A fierce polemic, filled with vigorous arguments and distressing human stories.
Chesler (The New Anti-Semitism, 2003, etc.) aims a loud wake-up call at her fellow feminists, charging that while feminism is not exactly dead, it is failing, suffering from the disease of politically correct passivity.
She argues that Western feminists are not focusing on the really important problem: jihadic Islamic terrorism. Western feminists, she claims, are largely leftists infected by a multicultural relativism that is actually a disguised form of racism and sexism, and they do not understand the dangers to our lives and our values represented by reactionary Islamism; further, she says, they have become rigid and intolerant of diverse opinions, silencing and harassing anyone, such as herself, who disagrees with them. Chesler’s personal experience with Muslim male psychology and the Islamic way of life is the subject of a chapter titled “My Afghan Captivity,” in which she tells of her mistreatment and virtual imprisonment in Kabul as the bride of a Western-educated Afghan and of her eventual escape back to the United States. She uses the expression “gender apartheid” to describe the position of women in fundamentalist Islamic societies, which seems a curiously bland term for cultural acceptance of genital mutilation, forced marriages of young girls, stoning of women and “honor” crimes. The author provides a host of examples of the brutal crimes committed against women by fundamentalist Muslim men, not just in non-Western countries but also in Europe, where millions of Muslims have emigrated in past decades and are largely unassimilated and hostile to Western culture. American feminists, she urges, must make the plight of Muslim women one of their top priorities. In her final chapter, Chesler calls on American feminists to rethink their priorities and work to make U.S. foreign policy reflect their concern for women’s rights everywhere.
A fierce polemic, filled with vigorous arguments and distressing human stories.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-4039-6898-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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.
