A significant and compelling sociological investigation.
A freelance journalist follows three women through pregnancy and childbirth at a Portland, Oregon, birth center.
Grant, who writes about reproductive rights, health, and justice, trains her investigative eye on maternal health, following her subjects from preconception through the postpartum period. The three mothers whose experiences anchor the book (a teacher, a nurse, and a birth center administrator) all chose to use a birth center, “a middle ground between the home and the hospital”—a choice made by only a few percent of American women each year. Birth centers generally don’t offer pharmacological pain relief and are the “domain” of a “small but mighty category of birth workers: midwives.” Grant’s subjects all had slightly different reasons for deciding to give birth outside of a hospital, but a few commonalities emerged: wanting to feel more “in control” during labor; a desire for a personalized, nurturing care environment; and a fear of the so-called “cascade of interventions,” the process by which, during a hospital birth, one obstetrical strategy, such as induction via Pitocin, can create situations requiring greater intervention, such as a C-section. The author skillfully interweaves the personal stories of her subjects and their families with a clear and engaging history of American childbirth practices over the years. The “modern midwifery system,” Grant writes, “can be traced back to the 1600s,” when women crossing the Atlantic “became midwives by necessity” when babies were born aboard ships. These de facto birth workers included both enslaved African women and the wives of White colonists. For the next several hundred years, midwifery retained a stronghold in Southern Black communities “due to a profound suspicion of white healthcare providers.” In the 20th century, a concerted effort on the part of the medical community moved birth out of the home and into the hospital—and, as the author notes, into the hands of largely male obstetricians.
A significant and compelling sociological investigation.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781982170424
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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