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MAD WIFE

A MEMOIR

Reflection and honesty that will move readers to sorrow, rage, and introspection.

Powerful postmortem of an abusive marriage.

Deconstructing the hetero-patriarchy that buttressed her toxic relationship is a weighty and confusing task, yet Hamilton does it with aplomb in this literary memoir. She does not ask for the reader’s pity as she dissects her dangerous marriage to a now ex-husband and the betrayal of those who did not believe her. How does the patriarchy uphold standards that support and normalize abuse like this? Hamilton both asks and answers that question in her honest and eye-opening story. Once readers dive into her unvarnished account , it is not easy to continue yet equally impossible to stop. Hamilton’s prose is cutting, uncomfortable, and heartbreaking. In her opening pages she asks, “Who is the monster here?” after detailing a violent outburst by her husband. She uses this thread to dissect patriarchal views that give more grace and understanding to men, even those who have proven to be brutal and cruel, and none to the women who endure their cruelty. At times, the tonal shift from intense memory recall to academic analysis can feel like being wrenched from the deep end of a pool of emotions into a lecture hall as Hamilton goes beyond personal experience to tackle the world that allowed her suffering to continue. “I am clear in my own mind that I do not tell this story to humiliate or wound,” she states. “I am trying to do something much less petty and more important: to make visible the ways in which misogyny shapes relationships, culture, and the legal system.” Hamilton calls upon feminist authors such as Kate Chopin, Maria Carmen Machado, and Angela Carter to find her footing within her emotions. Untangling the complex threads of her narrative is no easy task, but it’s worth the effort.

Reflection and honesty that will move readers to sorrow, rage, and introspection.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024

ISBN: 9780807016404

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024

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ABUNDANCE

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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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