Wood is a wonderful storyteller who captures the big picture without losing sight of the human detail.
“Writing on China’s past…is a daunting task, all the more so if one is not a sinologist,” notes Wood in the preface. “China is a huge and incredibly rich, indeed inexhaustible subject….With more than three millennia of written records, it has a vast history—small libraries have been written about each of my individual chapters!” In this smoothly readable book, the author shows he is up to the task, presenting a useful one-volume study of Chinese history perfect for students and libraries. Though Wood concentrates on the main dynasties, he sometimes veers into micro-level, intricate family stories to create a sense of immediacy amid the far-reaching historical currents. He moves swiftly yet thoroughly, wisely using geography to ground and orient readers. Like the ancient inhabitants of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, the earliest Chinese communities were tied closely to the Yellow River. These first civilizations were not near the sea but resided in the central plain, close to where the river emerges from the mountains—hence, China's early name as Zhongguo, the "middle land." Wood traces the rise and fall of the great dynasties who received "heaven's mandate," from King Yu's descendants (circa 1900 B.C.E.) to the Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing. Throughout the book, Wood masterfully extracts real stories, including those by remarkable women writers and observers such as the Song poet Li Qingzhao and Ming poet Fang Weiyi. The author also gives attention to the many heartbreaking tales that emerged from the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Scholars may debate some points, but Wood ably conveys the exciting Chinese saga through the ages in an accessible work that makes a massive historical narrative palatable to general readers.
Wood is a wonderful storyteller who captures the big picture without losing sight of the human detail.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20257-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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