Stirring narratives of defiance.
Why three women became vigilantes.
Drawing on in-depth interviews over many years, Emmy Award–winning journalist Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, creates vivid profiles of three women who responded to abuse with violence and vengeance. “Like alchemists,” writes the author, they “took their stories of pain and transmuted them into power.” In Alabama, Brittany Smith shot a man who had raped and nearly killed her. Angoori Dahariya, a lower-caste wife and mother, emulated India’s legendary Bandit Queen to become a leader of a gang of women who avenged crimes against the poor. Cicek Mustafa Zibo, at 17, joined an all-female militia, the Women’s Protection Units, that operated in concert with men’s units to fight against the Islamic State group in Syria. Flock portrays these women as tireless fighters against forces trying to silence them. Dahariya amassed a large following: From just a dozen at the start, her Green Gang swelled to more than 1,000 women, who shared stories “of domestic violence, dowry harassment, beating by in-laws, land-grabbing, police abuse, abandonment by husbands, molestation, rape, and more.” While her successes inspired other gangs to spring up across India, Smith faced repeated frustrations in defending herself against a murder charge, first claiming self-defense, then invoking the stand-your-ground law. Her case dragged on for years, during which she sometimes relapsed into drug use. Zibo was shot and seriously wounded, but she rejoined the fighting. Yet after nearly a decade of war, she often felt hopeless and embittered. These women, writes Flock, “sought to change the status quo, yet never fully escaped the oppressive systems they grew up in and continue to live under.” Nevertheless, they found, and inspired in others, “agency, a voice, and an identity beyond how the men in their towns saw them,” even though, in their own lives, “they got no perfect, happy endings.”
Stirring narratives of defiance.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063048805
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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