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SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO

Name: SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO
Author: Jess Hill
ISBN: 978-1-72822-226-4

THE DANGERS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE THAT WE IGNORE, EXPLAIN AWAY, OR REFUSE TO SEE

by Jess Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2020

An exposé of domestic abuse that portrays other countries more convincingly than it does the U.S.

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An Australian journalist finds countless faults with how society treats those who endure domestic violence.

Hill is all over the map, literally and figuratively, in this exploration of how “victims of domestic abuse have been blamed by the public, maligned by the justice system, and pathologized by psychiatrists.” After winning the Stella Prize for the Australian edition, the author has revised the book heavily for the North American market, and she finds antecedents for homegrown domestic abuse in the “deeply patriarchal and deeply sexist” views of the Puritans. Hill has a wealth of insight into why women stay with abusive partners; how the police and courts fail those who have suffered; the unique vulnerabilities of Aboriginal people; and the varied types of “coercive controllers,” who need more than one-size-fits-all “anger management” programs. The author also finds innovative solutions in countries including Argentina, which has special police stations for women, resembling living rooms with play spaces for children, where female victims find under one roof all the services they need—“lawyers, social workers, psychologists.” Hill stumbles, however, in analyzing the U.S., most notably when she suggests that in America, as elsewhere, “2014 will likely stand as the year when the Western world finally started taking men’s violence against women seriously,” in part because that was the year that NFL star Ray Rice assaulted his fiancee, Janay Palmer. In fact, as Rachel Louise Snyder writes in the excellent No Visible Bruises, the U.S. watershed came two decades earlier, when “Nicole Brown Simpson became the face of a new kind of victim” and Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. Hill’s global perspective is valuable—as is a chapter on women who abuse men—but Snyder’s book has a firmer grasp of the American issues.

An exposé of domestic abuse that portrays other countries more convincingly than it does the U.S.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-72822-226-4

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Review Posted Online: May 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.