An astonishingly original, powerfully honest vision for true survivor justice.
A comprehensive analysis of how American systems deny survivors of gender-based violence justice, comfort, and power.
According to Jezebel staff writer Cheung, a survivor of sexual assault, domestic violence has long been considered a “private” and “apolitical” matter created and perpetuated by violent individuals. However, the author argues convincingly that the opposite is true. In reality, every aspect of America’s political system—from the Senate, which grants disproportionate power to states with the highest rates of domestic abuse, to direct and indirect suppression of survivors’ attempts to vote and the rampant criminalization and subsequent incarceration of survivors—imbues abusers with power and denies survivors the ability to participate in the most basic aspects of democracy. The silencing of these critical voices has serious consequences for the safety of all survivors. Cheung documents how survivors are forced to co-parent with their rapists or lose custody of their children to their abuser, enforced in the courts of judges often appointed by presidents with their own histories as abusers. She also discusses how economic insecurity often keeps survivors in abusive relationships, a pattern reinforced by gendered wage gaps that particularly affect women of color. “Domestic violence, in fact, is not just political,” writes the author, “but quite literally a feature and consequence of greater systems of state violence: State and interpersonal violence are inseparable from each other, feeding each other in an endless cycle. Capitalist policies allow domestic abuse to thrive. Denied living wages and universal health care, many women are entrapped in abusive relationships because their abuser provides them health insurance, shelter, or money in general, and the state does not.” Cheung’s potent analysis, deep research, and compulsively readable prose coalesce into a refreshingly new, significant approach to ending domestic abuse. She is incredibly adept at blending anecdotal and statistical evidence into a clear global picture of a shockingly disturbing reality.
An astonishingly original, powerfully honest vision for true survivor justice.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781623179083
Page Count: 352
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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