A motivational call to arms on the subject of women’s equality.
In this debut nonfiction book, McDonnell draws on both personal experience and broader history to address the challenges facing contemporary feminism and to exhort women to unite and organize around a common goal. McDonnell addresses discrimination on the job—with many examples of both sexual harassment and unequal treatment from her career in a male-dominated industry—unequal access to health care, and domestic violence, among other issues: “At a minimum, we are obligated to ensure that women are safe from violence, are protected from harassment and discrimination at work, and receive a basic level of respect in every other way.” The book includes a number of specific equality-related goals—convincing the NFL to punish its players who act violently, incorporating women into medical studies and drug testing, passing the Equal Rights Amendment—though it is not always clear what will signal that the fight for equality as a whole has been won. While statistics and anecdotes develop McDonnell’s indictment of each problem the book addresses, sections addressing potential methods of individual and group action invite the reader to move from perusing background information to taking a stand. Discussion questions and a list of organizations and resources at the end of the book provide further opportunities for readers looking to turn education into action. Those who are new to participating in social movements will find the book’s motivational arguments and guidance valuable, but more experienced activists may be put off by McDonnell’s unfamiliarity with concepts like unconscious bias. Her casual dismissal of intersectionality and legitimate complaints about mainstream feminism (“I know that if you have self-identified as a Black/Hispanic/Asian/African/Native American or Jewish/Christian/Muslim/Buddhist woman, it might be difficult to identify yourself simply as a woman. But we must do this to achieve equality”) may also make the book unwelcoming to some readers. A passionate, well-intentioned, but at times superficial exploration of the fight for women’s equality, the barriers to achieving it, and strategies for working toward it.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9964844-0-4
Page Count: 154
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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