An inspiring portrait of a gutsy activist who produced a transformation in the political landscape.
The history of a defiant movement to elect women.
In 1980, Malcolm, the great-granddaughter of a founder of IBM, looking for a way to put her inherited fortune to use for effective social change, founded the Windom Fund, which contributed to organizations focused on women’s issues and voter registration. Soon, though, noting the dearth of women in Congress, Malcolm decided to address that dire political need by funding the campaigns of progressive, pro-choice Democratic candidates. Along with a handful of friends, she established EMILY’s List, an acronym for “Early Money Is like Yeast”—because it makes dough rise. Its premise was simple: the group would write letters about women candidates to its members, urging financial contributions of $100. With the assistance of Vanity Fair contributing editor Unger (The Fall of the House of Bush, 2012, etc.), Malcolm chronicles the exhilarating rise of this “unique kind of PAC.” Its membership eventually grew to 3 million and exerted decisive influence in women’s political achievements: helping aspirants, such as Barbara Mikulski and Dianne Feinstein, win primaries; helping candidates under attack—the authors document a vicious campaign waged against Ann Richards in her bid for Texas governor; and following election results down to their nail-biting conclusions. Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, heard before an all-male committee, and exposure on 60 Minutes galvanized much support. As more women earned seats in Congress and state houses, the group decided, in addition to funding, “to build from scratch a full-service political operation…that involved recruiting a new generation of women candidates, training them and their staffs,” and guiding them in fundraising, dealing with the media, and fending off the inevitable attacks. With more than 110 Democratic women elected to the House and 19 to the Senate, the group still has a major goal: to see Hillary Clinton elected president in 2016.
An inspiring portrait of a gutsy activist who produced a transformation in the political landscape.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-44331-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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