A captivating, essential perspective on a neglected conversation.
An intimate dive into the lives of female freedom fighters in the Global South, correcting long-standing American misconceptions of women, violence, and politics.
As the director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the City College of New York, Gowrinathan is perfectly equipped to tackle this significant yet overlooked subject, and she forces readers to reckon with the erasure of freedom fighters as political actors. Interspersed with her own family’s history with resistance in Sri Lanka, the author uses a combination of sociological critique, philosophical texts, political theory, and interviews she conducted over the span of 20 years to provide a new understanding of gender and power. “Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality,” she writes. Though the author is astute in her analysis of the complex issues at play, she is candid about her inability to offer concrete solutions. “As a part of a lifelong project that took shape in the image of the female fighter,” she writes, “Radicalizing Her is open-ended: offering no recommendations, only an exploration of new landscapes of political possibility.” Regardless, this book is a well-informed jumping-off point for any further study. From the heart-wrenching separation of Kala, a Tamil Tiger fighter, and her mother, Latha, who sought refuge in London, to Sandra, the senior commander in Bogotá’s branch of the FARC, the Marxist guerrilla group in Colombia, Gowrinathan examines the roles of rape, marriage, motherhood, and policies to create a necessarily complicated picture of why some women choose violence and some choose nonviolence as their preferred form of resistance. “Our view of the female fighter has been obstructed by both the moral compulsion to decry violent resistance and a societal drive to divide categories of thought along gendered lines,” writes the author, and this limited view perpetuates a host of oppressive myths about female fighters, myths that she corrects in this powerful book.
A captivating, essential perspective on a neglected conversation.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1355-7
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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