Affecting and inspiring.
The first book from the noted philanthropist focuses on women’s empowerment.
Gates explains that her public advocacy began with the conviction that women need the tools to let them decide for themselves when and whether to have children. But she soon realized that activism around discrete topics—e.g., contraception or girls’ access to school—was not enough: She needed to speak up for women in general. While it has long been understood that empowered women are key to the health of any community, in the author’s hands, the idea feels fresh, or at least energized. Even though she confesses that she didn’t always consider herself a feminist and that she found the idea of working for a wider women’s agenda overwhelming, Gates is a down-to-earth, likable narrator, and she has an eye for gut-wrenching tales. She introduces us to 11-year-old Selam, who spent a day cheerfully helping her mother prepare for a party only to be told, that evening, that she was to be married that night; and Meena, who, upon meeting Gates, told her she was unable to raise her two children and asked Gates to take the children home with her. Meena said that while she eventually learned about family planning, the education came “too late.” Unsurprisingly, the author, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and master’s in business from Duke, thinks that continuing to work on new technologies that can improve human lives is important, but just as crucial is the development of new and better “delivery systems.” What distinguishes this book from so many other depictions of women’s struggles around the globe is the author’s ability to connect Meena and Selam with women in white-collar workplaces in the U.S. Gates doesn’t just want rural farms to be rid of bias; she also wants offices in major cities to be “compatible with family life.”
Affecting and inspiring.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31357-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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