Despite repetitive language, this anthology will appeal to fans of women’s short-form confessional nonfiction.
Women writers present vastly varying perspectives and journeys of the meaning, cost, and fulfillment of their wishes.
Kahn and McMasters, editors of This Is the Place, take a similar tack in this second compendium of personal essays. Their introduction lays out their sincere yet sappy aims—e.g., “to create a space for women to interrogate and luxuriate in their desire.” The editors cast a notably wide net, although several essays would have benefitted from tighter editing. While the majority of pieces are engaging, frequent unoriginal word choices wear thin—desire appears nearly 250 times. The contributors explore myriad topics related to wanting objects (a $500 pair of cowboy boots, a dildo) in addition to experiences, which run the gamut from criminal to spiritual but are predominantly sexual. Tracing longings to their roots, many of the essayists deploy powerful metaphors that possess the capacity to connect women to themselves. The cowboy boots, for example, signify far more than footwear. “The opposite of a cowboy is an Indian woman,” writes Rena Priest. “I exist in the aftermath and ruin wrought by cowboys….I desire the power available to the self-assured cowboys of the American West.” In a stunning consideration of the enjoyment she takes in being sexually degraded by her White husband, Keyanah B. Nurse both implicates and empowers herself: “I center my own pleasure.” Long stymied by self-doubt, Domenica Ruta acknowledges craving “that feeling of control I first discovered in my abortion…the knowledge that my body would do exactly what I wanted it to do.” In an excellent study of Thomas Merton’s thorny relationship with his yearnings, Amanda Petrusich writes, “It’s a brutal cycle—we want things, we get things, we want more things, we get them, we want more.” By turns piercing and bloated, the book’s core magnetism lies in its breadth of voices and their respective depths. Other contributors include Larissa Pham, Karen Russell, Lisa Taddeo, Camille Dungy, and Melissa Febos.
Despite repetitive language, this anthology will appeal to fans of women’s short-form confessional nonfiction.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781646220113
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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