Filled with heart and engaging research, this book offers new light on an ongoing nationwide problem.
Historical analysis of how women have always been America’s de facto social safety net.
Sociology professor Calarco makes an evidenced-based argument about how women have been holding America together for decades, receiving little recognition or credit in comparison to their male counterparts. Drawing on 4,000 surveyed parents and five years of research, the author demonstrates the American tradition of relying on women to hold society together, forced to do the dirty work and bear the weight of a deeply flawed system. Calarco reveals that the U.S. continues to sell and push the neoliberal narrative throughout the country, instilling the idea that profit is the highest priority and that the state should stay out of it. The author chronicles the eye-opening stories of many people who have endured the worst of the system, including a single mother who struggles to stretch her meager state benefits while working three jobs and caring for her children; a daughter who became her family’s supplemental income foundation as a result of the opioid crisis. “Without a net, societies crumble,” writes the author. “That’s why people in the US are more depressed, more sick, and more likely to die young than people in other high-income countries. It’s why we work longer hours but produce less. Why we have a higher poverty rate…why we have more political unrest.” The lack of a net allows the broken system to continue to claim victims, more often than not leaving women to take on the grunt work. Calarco leaves readers to contemplate the many solutions mentioned throughout the book, from universal health care and child care to funding for agencies to assist the elderly. The author consistently emphasizes that it is a systemic issue, requiring a community response to be effective.
Filled with heart and engaging research, this book offers new light on an ongoing nationwide problem.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780593538128
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
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