A provocative book that asks important questions but relies on dubious data analysis.
An unusual, intriguing analysis of men’s opinions about women.
This genre-bending book expounds on two uncited surveys about gender roles featuring predominantly white, college-educated, and religious people. Biblical and historical examinations of gender roles, plus fictional dialogues among three 40-something male friends, supplement the survey responses. The opening chapter explores the profound influence mothers have on men. Camillo shares stories of powerful women throughout history and documents how gender equality has shifted from hunter-gatherer times to the modern day. The Old Testament’s Song of Solomon and the love story of Rachel and Jacob serve as aspirational models of romance. Camillo offers a retrospective of how standards of female sexiness have changed, from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy to Cindy Crawford. A majority of male survey respondents reported that smart women turned them on and that they would be comfortable with a woman financially supporting or outearning them. They also resoundingly agreed that platonic friendships with women were possible and that they would feel comfortable with female health care providers. Despite ample evidence that women do the lion’s share of housework and childrearing, 60% of men surveyed said it was not primarily women’s responsibility to attend to those duties. The last chapter considers societal interpretations of sexual harassment and assault throughout history, including the #MeToo movement, which most male survey respondents said had not changed men’s behavior. In this refreshing, conversation-starting book, Camillo effectively incorporates diverse perspectives on gender socialization. Many survey responses are progressive (84% of men are comfortable with female physicians, for example). However, the book’s foundational data is flimsy and, at times, erroneously interpreted. Though women were asked to guess men’s responses, Camillo occasionally states the results as if the women were speaking for themselves. Ultimately, the book notes but doesn’t interrogate toxic gender stereotypes in summaries like “Our survey indicates that a woman can have a lousy personality, no sense of humor, and not give a damn about the man she’s trying to attract, yet she can still be sexy in a man’s eyes.” Still, while the surveys are imperfect, the results point to the acceptance of gender equality among respondents.
A provocative book that asks important questions but relies on dubious data analysis.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798888247020
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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