A must-read for anyone who cares about educational—and societal—reform.
An award-winning journalist examines how higher education has unwittingly fostered the divides plaguing American society.
Before the end of WWII, college had been a “narrow pathway to success for the pampered elites,” writes Bunch, national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of Tear Down This Myth. However, postwar economic expansion and government programs like the GI Bill transformed colleges into places where less-privileged citizens could climb toward the prosperity their parents did not have. Bunch shows how the explosive growth in higher education, intended as a "public good," would eventually lead to the fracturing of American society. The liberal arts curriculum—and the leisure time that went along with student life—gave rise to a generation of young liberals who, at institutions like Berkeley and Columbia, protested against their imperfect democracy. The author suggests that this led to an inevitable political backlash from conservative politicians who questioned government/taxpayer support for higher education. It also gave rise to “credentialism,” the idea that a college degree was necessary to obtain a good job. By the 1980s, government policies forced families to bear the ever increasing cost of a college education—especially through loans—and the desire for a diploma transformed into a kind of “rough show-us-your-papers demand for clinging to the middle class.” Circa 2020, the university system, which caters to the wealthy and turns students of modest means into "indentured servants of debt,” has become an often hated symbol of elitism among what Bunch calls the “Left Behind.” In this consistently compelling, thought-provoking book, the author is quick to point out that no easy fix—e.g., cancelling student loan debt—exists. However, Bunch suggests that reform should include a national service like Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that targets qualified high school graduates to receive quality employment while fostering “a broader sense of shared purpose.”
A must-read for anyone who cares about educational—and societal—reform.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-307699-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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