Energetic, thoroughly engaging reading.
How women entrepreneurs are creating tech-based solutions to enhance female well-being.
Women’s health issues have long been neglected by both medical science and society, and the taboos still surrounding the word vagina make frank discussions difficult. In this refreshingly forthright book, financial journalist Gerner explores how gutsy female innovators working in femtech—an emerging technological field that focuses on “maternity, birth, periods, sex, menopause, fertility, and contraception”—are disrupting a health care system built to the measure of men. Stigma and a lack of understanding of female bodily functions are just two of the many hurdles femtech entrepreneurs face. Perhaps the most daunting barrier, though, is finding money to fund projects, since almost 90% of venture capitalists are men. Despite these difficulties, Gerner shows that women entrepreneurs are building profitable companies that specialize in everything from smart bras, period-tracking apps, and AI-powered vibrators to a nonhormonal liquid contraceptive gel and user-friendly artificial insemination devices. Those innovators with a bent for social justice are using technology to create tools that assist rural and/or low-income females. Three who call themselves “Synergistic Sisters in Science” have developed an app to assist pregnant women of color monitor health indicators and find “resources and peer support” as more and more “maternity care deserts” emerge across the United States. Gerner’s personal passion for the subject is clear in the many interviews she incorporates throughout the book with entrepreneurs and femtech innovators from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. As it redefines the “archetype of female entrepreneurship,” her highly readable book offers hope for positive new ways of not only thinking and talking about female bodies but also improving health outcomes for women worldwide.
Energetic, thoroughly engaging reading.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781728263304
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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