A passionate, candid, and convincing narrative of unmasking and revelation.
Exploding the profound hypocrisy of sexual life in Morocco.
As Slimani amply shows, Morocco is a country obsessed with sex, but premarital sex, adultery, abortion, prostitution, and homosexuality are all illegal—and, at the same time, rampant. The author of the well-received thriller The Perfect Nanny (2018), Slimani began the project that culminated in this book while on tour in Morocco for her first novel, Adèle, the protagonist of which is a woman with a double life: a secret sex addict who struggles to experience pleasure. Slimani’s feeling that this tale was a metaphor for the collective experience of young Moroccan women proved true when, one after another, women approached her to share their own stories of hypocrisy, oppression, and shame. In explicit opposition to what she calls “Morocco’s motto”—“Do what you wish, but never talk about it”—the author collects the stories of these women and others, one more troubling and outrageous than the next, threading in her own experiences and commentary. We learn that since “virginity is an obsession in Morocco and throughout the Arab world,” girls who have had sex, even via rape, pretend to be virgins and have hymen restoration surgery when marriage is on the table. We hear from a therapist who suffered through two violent marriages: “My second husband…used to rape me regularly. He would bring prostitutes into our home and tell me: ‘You’re lucky…I haven’t humiliated you by taking another wife. You ought to thank me.’ ” One of Slimani’s interviewees, a theology researcher and public intellectual, asserts that though “the Koran is notably silent on questions of sex,” in broadcasts “on the Arabic satellite networks, the ulama (experts on Islamic law) never stop talking about sex.” A particularly ludicrous recent fatwa prohibited women from touching bananas and cucumbers. You can imagine why.
A passionate, candid, and convincing narrative of unmasking and revelation.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313376-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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