Another attempt to solve contemporary women’s troubling conflicts about the need to stay home with the kids vs. the option of juggling job, home, and children. Crittenden is the 35-year-old founder of a Washington, D.C.—based periodical, the Women’s Quarterly; she’s also married and the mother of two young children. Women today, she claims, are going about it wrong: They—re starting careers and postponing marriage and childbearing until an age where their choice of partners is limited. If a woman waits to mate until she is past 30, then her pool of available men will be filled with “misfits and crazies”—or she’s likely to get stuck in an existing stalled relationship. Crittenden blames the feminist movement, in part, for promoting female self-absorption and obsession with independence. Her solution: Marry young, stay home with the children until they start school, and then launch a career. Why should the mother stay home instead of the father? Because women want to, argues the author, citing the results of various polls, as well as anecdotal material describing the “guilty tension that is felt by every working mother.” Crittenden also (mistakenly) blames feminists for elevating the value of work outside the home over work inside it. In fact, that prejudice existed long before the 1970s feminist movement began; actually, feminism attempted to critically address it. Crittenden writes persuasively about the rewards of long-term marriage and the complications of sexual freedom but seems less sensitive to issues of women aging, describing the post-45 period as the time when a woman’s “body finally fails her” and she becomes “less seductive.” Older mothers, she adds, are less capable of chasing toddlers in the playground. Balancing parenting, a spouse, and a career in our complex society requires skill, confidence, and maturity. Trolling for a husband at age 22 just because that’s when the pond is thick with fins—as Crittenden recommends’seems a regressive alternative.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83219-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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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
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