Thought-provoking interviews with young global activists hampered by uneven organization.
Personal coach Kimball presents the concerns of young feminist activists around the world in their own words.
As the holder of a doctorate in religious studies and the author of more than a dozen sociological and self-help texts, Kimball set out to interview young activists around the globe, ages 13 to 30, to discover the issues they face and their activism in response. Readers hear from women and girls in the United States, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Hungary, China, India, Turkey, Uruguay, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, and Canada, and the feminism-related topics include Black feminism, body image, gender identity, safety, reproductive rights, and corporate issues, among others. The beginning of the book reviews the feminist movement over multiple decades for more than 100 pages, including analyses of women’s leadership styles; first-, second-, third- and fourth-wave feminist concerns; women’s studies programs; intersectionality; and tactics for change, including modes of protest. This section is heavily footnoted in the manner of an academic paper before Kimball gets to the substance of the book—the interviews with young feminists. The situations and experiences of the subjects are often fascinating, and they vary widely. For instance, Nurzhan Estebesova in Kyrgyzstan, who was born in 1996, points out that women’s concerns in her country differ from those of Western women; for girls in this majority-Muslim country, education is key, she says, and the internet looms large as it offers access to new ideas to be identified and discussed. However, the book’s formatting can be confusing at times. The author’s questions are mixed in with the responses, and although the author’s comments are in italics and the interviewees’ in regular type, readers will frequently wonder who’s talking at a given moment; frequently, Kimball will merely comment, rather than asking a question (“You’ve done volunteer work in other countries”), which complicates a more traditional Q&A flow. Topics jump around chaotically, as well, making some interviews hard to follow, and Kimball’s habit of discussing the interviewees’ astrological signs may also dilute the book’s intended impact for readers without an interest in astrology.
Thought-provoking interviews with young global activists hampered by uneven organization.Pub Date: April 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780938795162
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Equality Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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