A breezy call for a radical new approach to reproductive rights.
A tongue-in-cheek, frequently sarcastic history of abortion practices from ancient times to the present.
In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, author Saint Thomas mines the historical record for some engaging reminders of the long history of the vilification of abortionists, midwives, and so-called witches. Women’s fertility has always fascinated and motivated humankind, and the author depicts some of the age-old rituals for encouraging or preventing conception, such as the Egyptian use of crocodile dung for birth control. Saint Thomas delves into stories around the “far-flung oppressors” like Emperor Constantine, Saint Augustine, witch hunters such as Heinrich Kramer (author of a “witchhunting handbook” titled Malleus Maleficarum), and officers of the Inquisition. She also finds some admirable stories of unusually courageous women, among them early practitioner of birth control Béatrice de Planisoles, the “first gynecologist” Trota of Salerno, French midwife Catherine Monvoisin (ca. 1640-1680), Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, abortionist Madame Restell, and Norma McCorvey aka Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade. Other characters making brief appearances are Pocahontas, Sally Hemings, “spiritual nihilist” Aleister Crowley, rabid anti-abortionist Michael Griffin (who murdered abortionist Dr. David Gunn in 1993), and Nancy Reagan’s astrologer Joan Quigley. The author is especially interested in the early colonial witch hunts in America. “Reproductive oppression and witch hunts,” she notes, “have always been intertwined.”
A breezy call for a radical new approach to reproductive rights.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780762485291
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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