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MOTHERS ON TRIAL

THE BATTLE FOR CHILDREN AND CUSTODY

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

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AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.

Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.

Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.

A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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