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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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