A celebration of female empowerment and empathy.
How women find support by banding together.
Inspired by the Women’s March of 2017—“the largest single-day protest on American soil”—CNN news anchor Baldwin traveled around the country interviewing women who have found “comfort, strategy, and stamina” from close camaraderie: what the author calls a huddle. “A huddle,” she writes, “is a place where women can become energized by the mere fact of their coexistence.” As a journalist in a male-dominated industry, Baldwin reveals her personal experiences in finding support from female mentors, sponsors, and her own huddle of friends. Women, she discovered, are each other’s “most valuable asset.” Conversations with women—some famous, such as Ava DuVernay, Stacey Abrams, and Gloria Steinem, and many others lesser-known—have convinced Baldwin that a “new, intersectional women’s movement” is thriving. In Houston, for example, she discovered the Black Girl Magic judge huddle, a group comprised of Black women supporting one another in their efforts to attain judgeships: In 2018, an unprecedented 19 were elected. Some of the huddles have had national impact: the #MeToo movement, for one, and Time’s Up, an initiative to raise money and public awareness for combatting sexual assault, harassment, and inequality in the entertainment and other industries. Other huddles emerge from various needs: Girls on the Run, a female-led nonprofit to support runners; Kode with Klossy, a coding camp for teenage girls; Hello Sunshine Filmmaker Lab for Girls, Reese Witherspoon’s project for empowering young aspiring filmmakers; GirlTrek, “America’s largest health movement for Black women”; and “the Badasses,” a text chain among newly elected Congresswomen. Besides huddles, Baldwin celebrates women who dedicate themselves to amplifying women’s stories and lifting up others. “When multiple women command respect,” Baldwin writes, “they provide a foundation for all women to demand respect.” Though the author uncovers little groundbreaking news, the stories are encouraging and often inspiring.
A celebration of female empowerment and empathy.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-301744-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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