A provocative, urgent look at a severely dysfunctional system, with children as the victims.
A sociological study on the contemporary practice of adoption.
As a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, Sisson has spent years studying reproductive health, abortion, and adoption. In an opening case study, the author describes a young woman who was physically abused by her boyfriend and had no familial support, requiring her to join “a cohort of American women that is remarkably small,” numbering only about 19,000, forced to “relinquish” their newborns. Most adoptive parents are white and prosperous enough to devote time and resources to raising families, which poor mothers do not have. The number is small because, in many cases, abortion is preferential to carrying a child through to birth. Not all of Sisson’s many subjects are poor: The 100 women in her sample sets “represented the full range of American life—their paths had all led them to adoption at one point, one way or another, but they were often on different trajectories.” Interestingly, she notes, poor families are not less capable of raising children, contrary to conservative arguments; it is access to resources that makes for differentials of outcome. The author also shows how adoption is a big business. More than half of the adoption centers in the U.S. are affiliated with evangelical churches, and they receive millions of dollars in public funding in many states. A built-in contradiction exists in the ideology of adoption: The women who keep their children are often considered inadequate to be mothers, but by giving up their babies, “they are better parents because they do not parent their child; the permanent separation rendered by adoption redeems them of their deviations and deficiencies.” Sisson concludes by deeming adoption the product of inequalities that speak to “social and systemic failure.”
A provocative, urgent look at a severely dysfunctional system, with children as the victims.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781250286772
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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