A dense overview of a movement with meaningful global implications.
An analysis of the latest wave of feminist protest in Iran.
In September 2022, Mahsa Amini was killed by officers of the Islamic Republic’s vice squad after being arrested in Tehran for wearing an ill-fitting veil. Her murder sparked a series of protests across Iran that lasted several months, fueled by social media and driven by Iranian youth, both male and female. While Iran has had its share of notable feminist activists following the Islamic Revolution and the implementation of the mandatory veil, Khosrokhavar contends that the “Mahsa Movement” established a new precedent for activism in the country, distinct in its embrace by youth whose growing secularization has cultivated a certain “joie de vivre” that lays a foundation for equality and cooperation between men and women. The author catalogs outrageous acts of violence against women, offers examples of increasing and broadening support and solidarity from popular icons and members of the diaspora, and tells of the defiant spirit among the youth in today’s Iran. But his chief preoccupation is with the dispositions of today’s Iranian youth, whose changing values and worldview swirl beneath their political activity and the Islamic Republic’s oppressive backlash. These youth belong to the “would-be middle class,” robbed of future prospects, economic mobility, and political freedom by autocracy and theocratic Shi’ism; they are calling for a full-blown alternative to the Islamic regime rather than posing arguments laced with theological justification and sensitivity. The text is well researched, but the author relies on repetitive insistence, rather than methodical organization, leaving the fullness of the Mahsa Movement’s singularity, promise, and forewarning rather unsharpened. Still, Khosrokhavar’s text clarifies the terms of the mounting pressure in the standoff between an increasingly desperate and ruthless Islamic Republic and its youthful citizens.
A dense overview of a movement with meaningful global implications.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781509564491
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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