Not just candid and clear revelations of abuse, but powerful demands for justice.
Fierce voices and muscular writing help contextualize the diversity of the #MeToo movement.
Edited by Oria (Fiction/Pratt Institute, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0: Stories, 2014), this short collection of essays, poems, and stories provides deeply personal perspectives on sexual harassment and gender-based violence. All of the contributors challenge assumptions and expose what Hafizah Geter calls “the bruises of patriarchy.” Amplifying the voices of survivors, the collection offers humor and power alongside trauma and pain. Samantha Hunt delivers a harrowing assessment of inherent dangers women face; Caitlin Donohue pens a letter of warning offered to her younger self (“Keep hold of your physical form. It is tangible proof of that which they say is theirs and must never be”); Honor Moore offers 17 brief entries exploring pervasive violence and a journey toward empowerment; Elissa Schappell chronicles an editor’s uncomfortable emails attempting to elicit a rape story. Throughout, thoughtful interrogations address how intersecting oppressions impact sexual violence and how behavior, from hinted threats to actual harm, may cumulatively wreak havoc, twist perceptions, and haunt survivors. Readers will connect with these narratives from trans women, women of color, and queer women, among others, confronting the invasive, cruel edges of misogyny and multiple forms of oppression. The contributors leave nothing unexamined, picking up complex themes of trust, self-destruction, forgiveness, and evolving notions of sexual assault. Examining the complicity of silence, internalized sexism, negotiated safety, childhood abuse, repeat offenders, and other issues, the pieces describe moments that add up to a potent cultural portrait of systemic, gendered hostility. As awareness of sexual violence continues to grow, this anthology functions as an empowered testament and treatise, a book for anyone interested in social justice. This important feminist work belongs on campuses and in community conversations. Other contributors include Melissa Febos, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Karissa Chen.
Not just candid and clear revelations of abuse, but powerful demands for justice.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944211-71-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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