A useful primer on why America’s treatment of raw sewage doesn’t pass the smell test.
Imagine that your septic system fails after you lost your job because of Covid-19 or another disaster. Your yard turns into a sewer, and you don’t have thousands of dollars for a new tank. Flowers shows that if your state enforces laws that criminalize the failure to maintain a legal septic tank, you could also get arrested. She sees such tragedies frequently among the mostly poor, Black residents of Lowndes County, where “an estimated 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate wastewater systems.” In an imperfect blend of memoir and reporting, the author recalls her years of work to ease conditions so unsanitary a U.N. official said he hadn’t seen them “in the first world.” With admirable tenacity, Flowers cultivated reporters; got help from Jane Fonda; took Cory Booker to visit a man whose backyard “held a pit full of waste piped straight from his toilet”; and persuaded Baylor doctors to conduct a study of the region, which found that 34.5% of tested residents had hookworm, a disease of poor sanitation that many people thought the U.S. had eradicated. Similarly dire sewage problems, she shows, exist in places from Appalachia to the San Joaquin Valley. In a largely chronological narrative, Flowers tends to present facts in the order in which she learned them—not when readers most need to know them—and slows the pace with overlong digressions into her earlier years and unedifying passages on topics such as “turning lemons into lemonade” and the effect of Jonathan Livingston Seagull on her life. The urgent message of the book, however, transcends its writing lapses, and it should raise much-needed awareness of a public health catastrophe.
A useful primer on why America’s treatment of raw sewage doesn’t pass the smell test.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-608-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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