A galvanizing collection of a traumatized population learning to believe in itself.
A compilation of committed Afghan women voices that underscores the great advances made in women’s lives and the arduous job still ahead.
Former first lady Laura Bush, in conjunction with her husband George W. Bush’s Presidential Center, lends her high-profile leadership to the plight of the women of Afghanistan, still among the most oppressed people in the world. A people of remote location and clannish, insular culture, the women of Afghanistan suffered horrendously during the Soviet invasion of 1979 and subsequent 10-year war, then under the stringent “gender apartheid” of the Taliban. Afghan women are still overwhelmingly illiterate (over 50 percent), while the average life expectancy is only about 52 years. The women selected here have managed to educate themselves, either by running away from resentful male figures in their family or with the help of a rare supportive father or husband—e.g., beekeeper Zainularab Miri, whose story of the powerful but captive queen bee forms an apt metaphor for the state of physical entrapment these women have endured, followed by flight and movement. After establishing basic security—i.e., not being punished for studying, walking in public, driving, or choosing their own husbands—the women assert that finding work is the first means of self-liberation and that learning a trade, such as weaving, allows them to reject what their society reinforces in them as a sense of being “useless humans,” especially widows. Divided into sections entitled Living, Learning, Working, Surviving, and Challenging, this work continually sounds the themes of confidence and self-improvement, which can only be achieved when the women raise their voices and overcome a societal-enforced shame. Many of the writers emphasize the need to educate the men as well. Mastoora Arezoo, of the Olympic Badminton Committee, asserts the need for participation in sports to promote health and fitness, while printer Freshta Hazeq has proven that women can succeed in male-dominated fields.
A galvanizing collection of a traumatized population learning to believe in itself.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2050-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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