A potent reminder of how far feminism has come and how far it has to go.
A British feminist activist gathers together stories from women worldwide about gender-based denigration suffered in both private and public spheres.
When Bates realized just how many “little pinpricks” of sexist intrusion— which included everything from male leering to outright physical assault—she had to deal with every day, she finally fully understood the deeply rooted nature of gender inequality. In this book, she shares her experiences alongside those of women who have written on Bates’ website about everything from “the niggling and normalized to the outrageously offensive and violent.” As she sees it, the main issue at stake is that “sexism is often an invisible problem.” Moreover, society forces women into silent compliance through various forms of abuse. Stories from young girls and adolescents, for example, reveal how they are still faced with the difficult and unfair task of reconciling pressures to be sexually available with those that condemn the expression of female sexuality. As adults, young women just out of college, who routinely face sexual harassment on the job, earn on average just 82 percent of what men do. And those holding elected office are still in the minority worldwide and are themselves often the targets of belittlement due to their gender. Bates suggests that the media, a social apparatus that “is controlled by men, for men,” plays an especially invidious role in the creation and perpetuation of damaging messages about female identity. Furthermore, those who do not fit the desirable image of femininity—whether because of age, race, class, or sexual preference—face even greater discrimination. The points the author makes about the struggles girls and women face worldwide are not new, but Bates’ digital activism and the passion behind her project to “force people to recognize that [sexism] is real” are forces to be reckoned with.
A potent reminder of how far feminism has come and how far it has to go.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06793-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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