Necessary, thoughtful, and heartfelt.
Two journalists examine the meaning of pregnancy loss in American culture and their own lives.
Giving birth to stillborn babies taught authors Little and Long one very painful lesson: “America is bad at talking about pregnancy loss.” It also showed them that pregnancy loss silence concealed other interconnected issues like miscarriage, abortion, and grief that profoundly impacted maternal lives. In this book, Little and Long use their experiences—and those of the many individuals they interviewed—as launching points into a larger discussion about reproduction and reproductive care in the United States. They argue that the great wall of silence they and others encountered derives from language that does not adequately do justice to the multifaceted nature of pregnancy loss. Indeed, any words that do exist “are strictly clinical or infused with stark political baggage.” They further observe that the overwhelming sense of failure that often accompanies such loss can be attributed to a system that—even in the more liberal Roe v. Wade era—emphasized the idea that “all kept pregnancies were wanted.” Miscarriage, like abortion, was therefore and implicitly a mother’s fault, an idea that kept women from speaking out about both for fear of being stigmatized. Now, in a hyperpunitive post-Roe era, discussion of miscarriage and abortion as part of the same reproductive spectrum is especially fraught, even though one might look like the other and be treated by the same methods. The authors point out that people are still finding the courage to share their experiences and grief through social media, but post-loss mourning is still viewed as a “malady” rather than a natural process. Sobering and well researched, this book lays bare major fault lines in a maternal reproductive care system in dire need of radical transformation.
Necessary, thoughtful, and heartfelt.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781728292755
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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