A well-crafted, absorbing account of Islamic women's lives as seen through the eyes of a secular-minded, Australian-born feminist journalist. Wall Street Journal Middle East correspondent Brooks describes with sensitivity and clarity her conversations and relationships with Islamic women, from the blue-jean-clad, American-born queen of Jordan to a devout Palestinian who shares her abusive husband with another woman in a four-room hovel with 14 children. Many of the obstacles she describes are well known: Some Islamic women are not allowed to show flesh or pray out loud in public (their voices are too arousing and could provoke unholy thoughts in men); many professions are closed to women; and severe sexual double standards still exist. However, Brooks's lively interpretations of Islamic tradition offer a useful challenge to Western stereotypes. According to her, Mohammed's teachings on the role of Islamic women, not to mention his living example, are complex and contradictory, often in direct opposition to the gender politics of today's extreme fundamentalists. Unfortunately, the author's naive faith in her own culture's progress allows her to make some rather arrogant statements, such as, ``Like most Westerners, I always imagined the future as an inevitably brighter place, where a kind of moral geology will have eroded the cruel edges of past and present wrongs. But in Gaza and Saudi Arabia...the future is a place that looks darker every day.'' Stemming from a similar blind spot, perhaps, is the short shrift given to Middle Eastern feminist activists and scholars. Few organized women's movements are discussed, and Brooks's treatment of Egyptian feminist Nawal Saadawi's persecution by the radical Islamic group Jihad and the Egyptian government totally overlooks the influence she has had; many believe Saadawi and other feminists are responsible, for example, for the Egyptian government's partial banning of clitoridectomy. Nonetheless, Brooks is a fine storyteller, though at times her tales feel incomplete. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47576-4
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
A mostly unsuccessful attempt to fathom the psyche of a doctor who claimed that voices often directed his bizarre behavior. Ablow, a columnist for the Washington Post and a practicing psychiatrist in Lynn, Mass., examines John Kappler's troubled life and tries to peer into his tortured mind. He opens this account with the day that Kappler, a truly unsympathetic character and a terribly dangerous man, drove his car off a parkway in Boston and aimed it carefully at two people on a pedestrian path. One of them, a psychiatrist friend of the author's, was killed. Ablow then turns to Kappler's childhood, looking for clues and speculating about the causes of his instability, anger, and destructiveness. He traces Kappler's spotty medical career (he was a freelance anesthesiologist, working out of some 50 hospitals in the Los Angeles area) and his frequent nervous breakdowns. Over the years Kappler received more than a dozen different diagnoses from psychiatrists and sporadically took numerous medications, including antipsychotics. Though he seems to have received little real help, it is not clear that he would accept any. Despite his problems and the threat his erratic behavior posed to patients, he continued practicing medicine until 1985, when he was accused of turning off a patient's life support system. Although the charges were later dismissed, Kappler, thoroughly disgraced, finally retired. The last portion of the book focuses on the murder trial in Boston, at which the central issue was whether Kappler was accountable for his actions or not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury found him guilty, but Ablow argues that he should more properly be seen as a victim—both of mental illness and of psychiatry's failure to help him. Ablow speculates and opines freely, but Kappler, who refused to be interviewed, remains a dark mystery.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-900161-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Armstrong issues a sobering call to repoliticize the issue of incest, which has fallen prey to the mental health field, its cadre of ``experts,'' and an antifeminist backlash. In 1978 Armstrong published Kiss Daddy Goodnight, which presented incest as ``the cradle of sexual politics'' where the rights of women and children collide with male entitlement and abuse of power. The attendant media hype turned Armstrong into ``the World's First Walking, Talking Incest Victim''; and since then she has witnessed the telling of incest stories become an end in itself. The personal is no longer political, she says, just public, as people accept fees to tell of their abuse on TV talk shows. She identifies a trajectory in public attitudes toward incest: first, it was ignored; in the mid-1980s the publication of The Courage to Heal (the incest ``Bible'') encouraged a therapeutic, personal approach to ``recovery'' devoid of any social significance; now, Armstrong argues, the issue is dominated by antifeminist backlash and sensational tales of satanic ritual abuse and of men and their families wrongly accused as a result of false- memory syndrome. Virtually ``every aspect of the social response to the issue of incest,'' she writes, ``has implied a policy of appeasement toward men.'' Armstrong documents a decade and a half of evasive responses to the problem of incest during which the number of children being sexually abused continued apace. These responses ranged from viewing incest as a mental illness rather than an abuse of power to abuse prevention ``games'' for children that overlook the fact that the offender is often a parent or trusted adult. An important, incendiary, unapologetic history written in hopes of rekindling the possibility of radical change—nothing less than a redistribution of gender power.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62471-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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