Eric-Udorie calls to mind a young Audre Lorde, and her anthology feels like a 21st-century version of This Bridge Called My...
A collection that aims to turn feminism’s gaze away from an agenda largely set by privileged white women.
In an eloquent and searing introduction, debut editor Eric-Udorie—an undergraduate at Duke University who was named Elle UK’s Female Activist of the Year in 2017—takes white feminists to task for ignoring the stories, suffering, goals, and power of “women of color, disabled women, queer women, trans women, poor women, and other marginalized groups.” The essays that follow examine everything from films about trans people to the death of Sandra Bland to body hair. Novelist Brit Bennett contributes an especially lyrical piece about the body-spirit dualism she learned as a young black girl in church. British journalist Aisha Gani offers a brilliant reading of the portrayal of Muslim women on TV (“a Muslim woman should not be newsworthy only if she is the first visibly Muslim woman in a particular field”). Several writers consider how political issues not always thought of as feminist problems—e.g., British immigration policy, cuts to Medicaid, the highly flawed American prison system—would look if seen through a feminist lens. One of the most incisive essays is by Frances Ryan, a columnist for the Guardian. She criticizes the way that disability typically features in abortion-rights discourse about abortion, discourse in which the prospect of being forced to raise a disabled child is held up as a specter of ghastliness meant to convince the likes of Phyllis Schlafly that abortion should be legal in at least some cases. This line of reasoning, Ryan notes, bolsters a cultural script in which disability is “something to be avoided at all costs.” She also argues that a feminist approach to reproductive rights that took disability seriously would include a fight to protect the rights of disabled women to raise children.
Eric-Udorie calls to mind a young Audre Lorde, and her anthology feels like a 21st-century version of This Bridge Called My Back.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313237-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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