An important book on a timely topic.
A journalist for Mother Jones gathers personal and historical accounts of abortion and abortion activist experiences before, during, and after Roe v. Wade.
Andrews argues convincingly that the battle over abortion is part of a larger “war on women.” To demonstrate this, she spent three years talking to individuals who sought abortions. The three-part narrative she constructs from these interviews, which she interweaves with discussions of reproductive rights history, is profoundly sobering. In Part I, the author shows how misogyny and racism, along with the professionalization of medicine in the 19th century, created “motivation for powerful people to frame abortion as an evil comparable to murder.” By the 1960s, anti-abortion laws gave rise to semiclandestine organizations like the Society for Humane Abortion and Jane, which linked some of Andrews’ interviewees with abortion doctors both inside the U.S. and abroad. In Part II, Andrews looks at how, by the early 21st century, conservative backlash against Roe v. Wade, the law that transformed an “evil” into a protected right, made it increasingly difficult for pregnant people—especially disenfranchised ones—to get abortions. At the same time, it revealed the way a racist medical establishment ignored the myriad social and economic issues that women and people of color faced while trying to maintain their reproductive health. Andrews concludes her study in Part III, arguing that the demise of Roe in 2022 was not only inevitable, but perhaps necessary. Until the connection between the devaluation of women and White supremacist gender control is fully articulated—and the complacency that gave rise to its end is replaced with a grassroots commitment to seeking reproductive justice for all—abortion will always be regarded with fear, suspicion, and even outright hostility. Necessary in its racial and gender inclusivity, this thoughtful book will appeal to anyone looking to understand the way forward in a post-Roe world.
An important book on a timely topic.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6839-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.
The New York Times columnist serves up a cogent argument for shelving the grudge and sucking it up.
In 1976, Tom Wolfe described the “me decade” as a pit of mindless narcissism. A half century later, Bruni, author of Born Round and other bestselling books, calls for a renaming: “‘Me Turning Point’ would have been more accurate, because the period of time since has been a nonstop me jamboree.” Our present cultural situation, he notes, is marked by constant grievance and endless grasping. The ensuing blame game has its pros. Donald Trump, he notes, “became a victor by playing the victim, and his most impassioned oratory, such as it was, focused not on the good that he could do for others but on the bad supposedly done to him.” Bruni is an unabashed liberal, and while he places most of the worst behavior on the right—he opens with Sean Hannity’s bleating lie that the Biden administration was diverting scarce baby formula from needy Americans to illegal immigrants—he also allows that the left side of the aisle has committed its share of whining. A case in point: the silencing of a professor for showing an image of Mohammed to art students, neither religiously proscribed nor done without ample warning, but complained about by self-appointed student censors. Still, “not all grievances are created equal,” he writes. “There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.” Whether from left or right, Bruni calls for a dose of humility on the part of all: “an amalgam of kindness, openness, and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance.”
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668016435
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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