An unblinking look at gender bias in child-custody battles.
Fathers’-rights advocates have picketed her lectures, but Chesler (Psychology, Women’s Studies/CUNY; Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, 2009, etc.) storms the gates with a compelling and well-researched update of her 1986 landmark title. With eight new chapters, the author continues her investigation into how patriarchal attitudes and laws are prejudiced against mothers during custody battles. By analyzing hundreds of legal documents and interviewing custody experts as well as mothers, fathers and children from diverse backgrounds, the author outlines the decline in legal justice many mothers have experienced since 1986. Breaking up the parade of bleak statistics, the Chesler weaves heart-rending (and enraging) stories of the “good enough” mother, a sole caregiver often slandered as morally questionable if she has a relationship during her divorce or as mentally unbalanced if she is emotional about the loss of her children. Yet the “good enough” father, Chesler writes, performs a few household chores and is applauded as an exceptional parent, regardless of his personal lifestyle. While other sources could likely produce as many horror stories about judicial bias against fathers, Chesler’s facts cannot be denied: 37 percent of the men in her study kidnapped and brainwashed their children against the mother but were never punished; 70 percent of all the battles resulted in court-ordered paternal custody; 90 percent of all the fathers paid no alimony. The author also includes straightforward advice for readers from mothers and a divorce lawyer, along with several resources for additional help.
Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55652-999-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
