A useful resource for scholars and students of gender studies and cultural anthropology.
A sometimes-belabored but mostly accessible argument that male domination is a cultural and not biological imperative.
Why have men held disproportionate power across societies and millennia? British science journalist Saini, author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, combs through the archaeological and anthropological literature to examine leading theories. While patriarchy is widely seen in both human societies and the animal kingdom, there is plenty of variation in both realms, including greater or lesser degrees of inequality and of women’s participation in leadership. While some scientists—almost always men—have insisted that the patriarchy is the natural outgrowth of the biological fact that men are larger and stronger, the evidence more broadly points to cultural constraints. Usefully, Saini resurrects the once-forgotten work of anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, who examined Neolithic societies to adduce an “old Europe” centered on goddess worship and gender parity—until it was conquered by a warrior society from the Eurasian steppes. This hypothesis of migration and submission was long disputed, but, as Saini notes, “remnants of ancient DNA point to the likelihood that it did happen,” perhaps 4,500 years ago, when Stonehenge was built. Gimbutas has not been the only scholar to point to times, mostly ancient, when women’s roles were far higher up in the social hierarchy, as in the dynasties of ancient Mesopotamia and the traditions across later centuries of female warriors. Interestingly, Saini brings these traditions to the present by examining the supposed gender equality instilled by the Bolshevik Revolution, which, though largely undone (and now officially disavowed by the Putin regime), did witness the phenomenon of more than 800,000 Soviet women fighting alongside men in World War II. From start to finish, Saini sounds a constant theme: “As far back as we can see, humans have landed on rainbows of different ways of organizing themselves, always negotiating the rules around gender and its meaning. Nothing was static.”
A useful resource for scholars and students of gender studies and cultural anthropology.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780807014547
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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