A brisk, authoritative, and timely history.
The social, cultural, and legal battle against sexual harassment has raged for 50 years.
Drawing on interviews, histories, and abundant news articles, Hirshman (Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World, 2015, etc.) offers a savvy and well-informed history of women’s decadeslong fight against sexual abuse and harassment from the 1960s, when there was “no legal category for sexual harassment,” to the outburst of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements and the triumph of women candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Catharine MacKinnon emerges as a driving force in the struggle. As a Yale Law School student, she argued that sexual harassment was discrimination, prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time, legal decisions in harassment cases were “motivated by a vision of women, collectively, as inferior to their male counterparts and subject to their whims.” In 1979, MacKinnon published her groundbreaking Sexual Harassment of Working Women, which Hirshman praises as “a little book that started a big war.” Hirshman’s inventory of crucial moments in women’s rights includes Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas before a judiciary committee chaired by Joe Biden, who showed Hill no sympathy. Thomas’ confirmation spurred women to enter—and win—political races in 1992, writes the author. But in sexual matters, many feminists—including icon Gloria Steinem—argued for a liberal, celebratory view of workplace sex, including sex between individuals of vastly unequal power—such as Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. By defending her husband, Hillary Clinton herself, purportedly a human rights advocate, “got to decide when the women in her husband’s sphere were political subjects, with human rights.” The public conversation over sexual harassment was ignited by websites like Bitch, Feministing, and Salon’s Broadsheet and by the media’s coverage of issues such as date rape, the legal meaning of “consent,” and suits against prominent and powerful men. Hashtag activism, Hirshman asserts, allows women to be “literally inventors of their own empowerment.”
A brisk, authoritative, and timely history.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-56644-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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