An excellent contribution to the literature of contemporary electoral politics.
Washington Post writer Rubin delivers a thoughtful study of the critical role of women in containing and defeating Donald Trump.
There were plenty of Republican women who supported Trump’s nationalist, White supremacist regime. Upon his election in 2016, writes the author, “I steeled myself for the likelihood that Republicans would countenance reckless and even illegal behavior.” Which they did, to destructive effect. But there were plenty of others who were determined to fight Trump’s policies. Many left the Republican Party as a result of his election since the signals were strong that women would have little in the way of a meaningful role in the new administration—unless their name was Ivanka. Many more organized, ran for office, joined grassroots organizations, and donated time and money. Rubin ponders numerous questions that may in fact be imponderable, including the central one of the moment: Why wasn’t Hillary Clinton elected? The answer may hinge in part on her weakness as a campaigner; more likely, writes the author, it was simple misogyny at work. Whatever the case, the resistance of women had an immediate effect, proven in the 2018 midterm elections, when, in formerly Republican Virginia the Democrats fielded a record number of women candidates at all levels of government, including a transgender woman, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and a self-identified lesbian. All won. Even in Alabama, “every single county swung left compared to 2016,” while in Georgia, Stacey Abrams, foreseeing legislation that would attempt to suppress the minority vote, enrolled more than 1 million Black voters. (Rubin correctly notes that if women were the principal change agents in 2018 and 2020, Black women were at the absolute center of the movement.) A sleeping giant thus awakened, Rubin holds that no one should imagine that women will now sit back and allow Trump to return, since, after all, he “taught us the unacceptable price of passivity.”
An excellent contribution to the literature of contemporary electoral politics.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-298213-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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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