A hard-hitting message about a brutal practice that’s clearly aimed at a European audience. American readers will wonder if...
Third volume in Revlon model Dirie’s continuing campaign to bring an end to the practice of female genital mutilation.
Desert Flower (1998, not reviewed) told of the author’s personal experience with FGM as a child in Somalia and of her escape to England; it also recounted her work combating the practice in Africa as a UN Special Ambassador. Here, she examines the extent of FGM in Europe. Dirie estimates that at least half-a-million women and girls currently living in Europe have been mutilated or are at risk. She describes her travels throughout the continent interviewing women working to eradicate the practice, health workers, women who have endured FGM and doctors who perform reconstructive surgery. She paints a vivid picture of what FGM does to a woman’s body and frequently lets the victims tell in their own words of its devastating physical and psychological effects. Her text makes it clear that many of these women, though they reside in European countries, are almost completely isolated from Western culture. They may not speak the country’s language or have any knowledge of its mores or laws; they are subject to their husbands’ dictates. As a black woman and victim of FGM, Dirie made an intimate connection with her interviewees. While acknowledging that some cultural traditions dictate FGM as a prerequisite for marriage, she adamantly rejects the assertion that Islam requires it, and she demands that imams speak out against it. She also calls for better education of the general public, women at risk, social workers and health workers; for greater recognition of the crime in European judicial systems; and for increased prosecution and punishment of offenders. Appendices summarize the known facts about FGM; outline FGM legislation in various European nations; and list sources of help.
A hard-hitting message about a brutal practice that’s clearly aimed at a European audience. American readers will wonder if the problem exists within U.S. borders.Pub Date: May 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-84408-252-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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