An informative study of cisgender female care in medicine, from hysteria to Covid-19, with a focus on chronic pain.
An exploration of how “women’s pain is all too often dismissed, their illnesses misdiagnosed or ignored."
Jackson, an associate news editor at the Guardian, breezily translates decades of medical research, interviews, and statistics into a book that challenges what we think we know about women’s health and pain. The author, who suffers from endometriosis, expands on her earlier journalism on the condition, writing of the startling misconceptions surrounding cisgender women’s treatment in the medical system. Jackson locates the foundation of modern medicine’s dismissal and misdiagnoses of countless women by detailing the history of hysteria and its insidious consequences for women. For example, she highlights how most people would be surprised to learn that “in 2004, 7.4 million women over 60 years of age died of cardiovascular disease compared with 6.3 million men.” This misconception—that heart disease afflicts the male population more than the female population—is one of many Jackson corrects throughout the book. She adroitly synthesizes complex medical studies and interviews with medical professionals, patients, and researchers. One conclusion is that medical professionals’ current lack of consensus on the best treatments for women with chronic diseases is due to the paucity of clinical trials and dedicated funding for research into how these diseases specifically affect cisgender female patients—or female rodents in trials. Jackson is most effective when she brings together disparate sources and findings to reach digestible conclusions. The author’s personal tale of her struggle with endometriosis creates an engaging familiarity with readers, but her occasionally derisive tone toward men, lumped together as an undifferentiated group, could alienate an otherwise receptive audience. Nonetheless, Jackson is effective in her presentation of pertinent, often surprising information that could help many women stay healthy and find quality, personalized health care.
An informative study of cisgender female care in medicine, from hysteria to Covid-19, with a focus on chronic pain.Pub Date: March 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77164-716-8
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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