A well-rendered, dismaying picture of repression.
Women and work in Egypt.
Award-winning journalist Chang, author of Factory Girls, brings an informed historical and cultural perspective to this close look at women’s lives in contemporary Egypt. Beginning in the 1980s with the spread of fundamentalist ideas, an increasingly conservative society has circumscribed women’s freedom, making them a minority of the nation’s workforce and impeding them from gaining social, economic, and political benefits from job opportunities afforded to women in other modernizing countries. In Egypt, Chang found, women wanting to work outside the home confront stubborn opposition from their families, fiances, and husbands: “The end goal is predetermined—to marry, quit, and become a homemaker.” The author focuses on three women working in the textile and garment industry: Rania, ambitious and skilled, who rose to become a supervisor; Doaa, a factory security guard who is continuing her education, with aspirations to become a social worker; and Riham, who earned a college degree in production engineering and rejected working for her family’s textile business to establish her own clothing factory. For Rania, trapped in a bad marriage, the workplace served as “a place of refuge.” For Doaa, who divorced her husband, and in doing so was forced to give up custody of her daughters, work meant independence. For Riham, running a factory meant having a chance to innovate. Unlike these women, many others have been undermined by poor-quality education, especially in rural areas; and some who get jobs often balk at workplace demands, taking breaks to eat at their work area or simply leave. Factory employees “might quit on a whim or vanish for a month, cry at the sight of new technology, or fall asleep in the bathroom.” Drawing on perceptive observations and interviews, Chang reveals a society “not developed enough to benefit from globalization,” where misogyny and patriarchy stifle women’s potential.
A well-rendered, dismaying picture of repression.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780525509219
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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