The assumption of men’s ill-will and bad behavior toward women will doubtless rankle many male readers, but women’s study...
A feisty challenge to the notion that females are the weaker sex.
Spurred by the evidence of her daughters’ physical confidence and self-esteem, Dowling (Red Hot Mamas, 1996, etc.) set out to examine how the perception of frailty has shaped women’s expectations and self-image. The frailty of women, she asserts, is not a reality but a myth with an agenda: it is driven by men’s wish to maintain their domination over women. The author puts the physical achievements of the present generation of young women in perspective by looking back at the restrictions hobbling women in the 19th century: as she describes them, Victorian views on female weakness (i.e., young women were forbidden to climb stairs during their menstrual periods lest they harm their reproductive organs and render themselves unfit for childbearing) seem so absurd as to be both amusing and astonishing. Less humorous is her account of how, for most of the 20th century, women were kept out of school athletics, the Olympics, and professional sports. Here she also looks at the effects of Title IX and the persistence of inequities and negative attitudes. She finds that inadequate physical education and social pressure still keep many girls and young women from discovering the power of their bodies. However, women are closing the strength gap, says Dowling, who cites biomechanical assessments of male and female athletic performance indicating that physical abilities of top-level females equal and sometimes surpass those of top-level men. Thus, when height is factored in, Florence Griffith Joyner is seen to be 5.3 percent faster than Carl Lewis, she notes. Dowling’s take-home message is that physical equality, by bringing to an end male domination, is the final stage of women’s liberation.
The assumption of men’s ill-will and bad behavior toward women will doubtless rankle many male readers, but women’s study groups should find this convincing and comforting—if not downright inspiring.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50235-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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