Strong, thoughtful, and angry voices ring out for resistance, empathy, and solidarity.
Women essayists reflect on Trump, Clinton, and the prospects for feminism.
Mukhopadhyay (Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life, 2011), senior editorial director of Culture and Identities at Mic, and Harding (Women’s Resource Center/Cornell Univ.; Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do About It, 2015, etc.) gather a diverse collection of essayists to respond to the challenges faced by women in Trump’s America. The writers include Cheryl Strayed, who felt “numb shock” after Trump’s election; Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who offers suggestions for activism for reproductive rights; and award-winning essayist Rebecca Solnit, who points to the “highly gendered term ‘hysteria'" used to attack Clinton. Many writers agree with Carina Chocano, who sees Clinton’s defeat as a result of gender bias: “there’s no more despised figure on earth than a woman who thinks she should be in charge.” The anthology is broadly representative. Sarah Michael Hollenbeck considers women with disabilities; Jill Filipovic points out the plight of women in Africa after Trump’s “gag rule” prohibited U.S. funding to any foreign organization that provides abortions or advocates for abortion rights; Melissa Arjona writes about Mexican women living in South Texas; Collier Meyerson and Zerlina Maxwell consider black feminism. Also represented are gay and trans women, such as Meredith Talusan, who asserts that “Clinton’s loss, despite the fact that she was exceedingly better qualified than Trump, mirrors the way trans women and femmes are marginalized in post-Trump feminism, despite our significantly greater experience of fighting oppression” compared to mainstream white women, who, several writers note, dominated the women’s march after Trump’s inauguration. Kera Bolonik, a gay mother raising an adopted black son, and the granddaughter of Jews persecuted by Nazis, sees parallels to fascism in the atmosphere of hate and fear unleashed by Trump and his supporters.
Strong, thoughtful, and angry voices ring out for resistance, empathy, and solidarity.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-15550-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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