A no-holds-barred condemnation of discriminatory training policies within the Marines and of systemic sexism facing women...
A passionate account of a former Marine Corps officer’s fight for equality and justice in a historically sexist system.
When Lt. Col. Germano was hand-selected to take command of the 4th Recruit Training Battalion at Parris Island, a group that trains only female recruits, she was well-aware of the challenges ahead. The Marine Corps is the only service that still segregates men and women during basic training, and the biased strategy is a breeding ground of issues. Implemented after an outdated, inaccurate study that showed mixed-gender units performed worse than single-sex units, the training program holds women to lower standards and maintains the damaging assumption that women are inherently mean and emotional. This strategy results in poorer performances in female recruits as well as dangerous and destructive behavioral issues. When Germano took command of 4th Battalion for what was supposed to be the swan song of her 20-year career, she was determined to change things for the better and prove women could be just as effective as men. After a year in charge, Germano’s recruits had markedly improved performance and fewer behavioral issues and injuries, and the overall quality of life at the training camp improved. Despite these achievements, the author’s high expectations and no-nonsense command style shook up the status quo and the many Marines and leaders who wanted to protect it, and she was ultimately fired. Using her firsthand experience and anecdotal evidence from her year in command, Germano concludes that it was sexism, prejudice, and an overt opposition to women’s success that ended her career. At times, the author is repetitive, and her prose can feel clumsy and awkward. Still, she provides a unique, powerful story of sexism and gender bias that will resonate with women across industries and experiences.
A no-holds-barred condemnation of discriminatory training policies within the Marines and of systemic sexism facing women everywhere.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63388-413-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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