Vivid portrayals of lives disrupted and freedom denied.
The human consequences of the Dobbs decision.
Health care reporter Luthra makes her book debut with an intense look at the lives of patients and providers after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She takes her title from the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court held that states could limit access to abortion, as long as the limitation did not impose what the Court called “an undue burden,” a phrase that they left undefined. As Luthra traveled throughout the country, she found frustration and anguish in states where women had no or limited access to abortion. In Texas, which enacted a six-week ban on abortions even before the Supreme Court’s decision, 16-year-old Tiffany was trapped in a system that she felt powerless to negotiate, lacking resources to find help or leave Houston. Kaleigh, 29, drove 500 miles, with her boyfriend, from Dallas to a clinic in New Mexico, the nearest she could find, where she was given mifepristone and misoprostol; her abortion cost her $700. In Florida, which had a 15-week ban, the author met Jasper, a transgender man who did not realize he was pregnant until it was almost too late to get an abortion in his state. In Oklahoma, which had only four clinics in the entire state that provided abortions, and which, like Texas, soon copied a six-week ban, Luthra met providers overwhelmed with demand. Patients and providers revealed the fear, anger, and betrayal they felt as laws changed. One woman in Kansas had an abortion scheduled for just two days after a critical vote affirmed access. The author underscores the way the Dobbs decision has exacerbated inequality, victimizing Black and Latine women who cannot afford to travel to New Mexico, Illinois, California, and Colorado, where abortion is legal.
Vivid portrayals of lives disrupted and freedom denied.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550086
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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