Thought-provoking interviews with young global activists hampered by uneven organization.
Personal coach Kimball presents the concerns of young feminist activists around the world in their own words.
As the holder of a doctorate in religious studies and the author of more than a dozen sociological and self-help texts, Kimball set out to interview young activists around the globe, ages 13 to 30, to discover the issues they face and their activism in response. Readers hear from women and girls in the United States, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Hungary, China, India, Turkey, Uruguay, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, and Canada, and the feminism-related topics include Black feminism, body image, gender identity, safety, reproductive rights, and corporate issues, among others. The beginning of the book reviews the feminist movement over multiple decades for more than 100 pages, including analyses of women’s leadership styles; first-, second-, third- and fourth-wave feminist concerns; women’s studies programs; intersectionality; and tactics for change, including modes of protest. This section is heavily footnoted in the manner of an academic paper before Kimball gets to the substance of the book—the interviews with young feminists. The situations and experiences of the subjects are often fascinating, and they vary widely. For instance, Nurzhan Estebesova in Kyrgyzstan, who was born in 1996, points out that women’s concerns in her country differ from those of Western women; for girls in this majority-Muslim country, education is key, she says, and the internet looms large as it offers access to new ideas to be identified and discussed. However, the book’s formatting can be confusing at times. The author’s questions are mixed in with the responses, and although the author’s comments are in italics and the interviewees’ in regular type, readers will frequently wonder who’s talking at a given moment; frequently, Kimball will merely comment, rather than asking a question (“You’ve done volunteer work in other countries”), which complicates a more traditional Q&A flow. Topics jump around chaotically, as well, making some interviews hard to follow, and Kimball’s habit of discussing the interviewees’ astrological signs may also dilute the book’s intended impact for readers without an interest in astrology.
Thought-provoking interviews with young global activists hampered by uneven organization.Pub Date: April 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780938795162
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Equality Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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