by Vanessa Grigoriadis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017
This is a vital, timely issue, and the author’s research is impressively in-depth, but an overabundance of anecdotes and...
An award-winning journalist reports from the front lines of the sexual assault controversy.
Entering the complex, contentious conversation about sexual assault on college campuses, New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair contributing editor Grigoriadis offers an extensively researched investigation based on dozens of case reports and interviews with 120 students (accusers, accused, and activists) from 20 universities and 80 administrators and experts. What has emerged from her three years of research, though, are more questions than satisfying answers: what constitutes sexual assault? How prevalent is the problem? How should colleges address assault charges? How can assaults be prevented? Types of college assault, she found, occur in four main categories: penetration (“intercourse, oral sex, and fingering”); “incapacitated rape,” meaning “sex that happens when the victim is unconscious”; any aggressive act, such as groping; and “the vast middle ground” of sex without consent. Incapacitated rape, the author reveals, is the most common type, resulting from a culture of heavy drinking at most residential colleges. The most significant risk factors for assault are “free-flowing alcohol and misogyny,” both of which are hallmarks of fraternities. “If you want to maintain your status as a striving middle-to-upper-middle-class member of society,” Grigoriadis asserts, “having been part of the Greek system in college is a sure way to do it.” She paints a dismal picture of college social life, where students feel pressured to hook up, where boys are confused about what constitutes consent, and where girls—often falling-down drunk—acquiesce to sex that they don’t really want. As a society, writes the author, we’re afraid “to tell girls that they too bear responsibility for their sexual behavior and safety.” In an appendix, she offers common-sense advice for students and parents: “watch out for guys who exhibit toxic masculinity”; watch what you drink; “learn a few self-defense tricks”; and carefully read the sexual-misconduct section of the college handbook.
This is a vital, timely issue, and the author’s research is impressively in-depth, but an overabundance of anecdotes and statistics offers little clarity on the issue.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-70255-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2014
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ; adapted by Jean Mendoza & Debbie Reese
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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