An engaging and wide-ranging look at new developments in banking access.
A comprehensive look at how to bring more women into the global financial system.
In this debut nonfiction book, Iskenderian, the head of Women’s World Banking, a nonprofit focused on women’s access to the financial services around the world, offers insights into how the banking world can best adapt to the needs of women and what can be done to enable more women without bank accounts to access banks’ saving and borrowing functions. (The author points out that a third of all adults are “unbanked.”) The book explains why the ability to participate in the financial system matters, the specific barriers that keep women from establishing accounts and getting loans, and what interventions have made meaningful differences. It also addresses the profit-driven business case for greater inclusion in addition to the human rights rationale. Iskenderian looks at how developments in both mobile and in-person banking have offered new opportunities for inclusion, addresses the limitations of microfinancing, and shows that changes to banking access have wide-ranging impacts on families, communities, and regions. Policy wonks will appreciate the detailed and data-driven background; the author is both well informed and skilled at explaining such information in depth. Along the way, she offers policy recommendations supported by fully cited studies in a prose style that, while occasionally dry, is refreshingly free of jargon and minimizes complexity: “As long as women lack the ability to claim assets in their own names, they will be denied full financial inclusion.” The book’s holistic approach to financial inclusion—addressing insurance along with the ability to save and borrow and drawing connections between financial empowerment and gender-based violence—adds a valuable layer to the discussion and expands on the existing literature. The book concludes with concrete, plausible policy recommendations, suggestions for further research, and reminders about the importance of expanding access to banking. Readers with an interest in financial technology, women’s empowerment, and economic development are likely to find the book informative and enjoyable.
An engaging and wide-ranging look at new developments in banking access.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-262-04644-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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