Health care policymakers and medical consumers alike will find these arguments urgent—and in dire need of solution.
Caring for those who cannot care for themselves is at a tipping point—and almost certain to reach a catastrophic state.
British sociologist Dowling observes that in the U.K. between 2012 and 2022, the number of 75-year-olds will have increased by 1 million, and their growing needs for care will not cease. However, she writes, “the forces of capital have become less interested in the reproduction of any national labour force.” In other words, the tenor of the current British government is one of retrenchment, austerity, and, more than anything else, privatization. Dowling’s examples and language—as when she asks, “is lifting bins or driving a lorry more of a skill than looking after elderly or vulnerable people?”—are British through and through, but of course the Brexit Party took many of their marching orders from the same people who gave us Donald Trump, including the thought that government should unknot its welfare net and outsource as many social service jobs as possible. The result, writes the author, is that home care—“never a high-status job in the first place” but at least one that was recognized as necessary and respectable—is now turned over to low-paid, hourly workers who are not reimbursed for time spent traveling from patient to patient and are penalized for spending too much time with any given one. That is, if they’re paid at all; Dowling notes that much care work is now performed by family members without remuneration. The austerity regime, argues the author, achieves its legitimacy, such as it has any, “through a denial of the structural reasons why people need welfare in the first place,” when in fact those needs are expanding owing to “the systematic underfunding of social care.” Among the possible remedies she explores are social-impact investing, community care, decentralization of state mechanisms to fit the needs of local populations, and, of course, more money.
Health care policymakers and medical consumers alike will find these arguments urgent—and in dire need of solution.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78663-034-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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