Although the author’s well-delineated examples will ring outrageous to modern-day ears, she reminds us how much there is...
An elucidating study of landmark sex-discrimination cases waged in the wake of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
A Brooklyn-based senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, Thomas presents 10 cases that illustrate the early efforts by working women to find some equality and justice in the workplace, from being hired in jobs once the exclusive domain of men to protection from sexual harassment and from discrimination for pregnancy. A cadre of crusading attorneys and frustrated working women challenged the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency endowed by Title VII to enforce the statute—which included an amendment against sex discrimination almost as a risible afterthought—over many decades after the law’s 1964 enactment, paving the way for the advances of working women today. Each case took years and moved all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 1966, receptionist Ida Phillips was outraged at being refused employment at missile manufacturer Martin Marietta in Orlando, Florida, for having preschool-age children and sought help from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Her case (Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation, 1971) would be the first time the court would consider the meaning of Title VII’s “because of sex” provision. In 1975, Brenda Mieth and Dianne Rawlinson challenged Montgomery, Alabama’s official restrictions against hiring women as state troopers and prison guards (Dothard v. Rawlinson, 1977), and Mechelle Vinson’s attempts to stop the hostile treatment by her supervisor at a Washington, D.C., bank became a groundbreaking case against sexual harassment in the workplace (Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 1986). In the late 1980s, women workers at a Vermont car-battery manufacturer challenged the company’s official “fetal protection” policy, which essentially relegated women to lower-paying jobs (International Union, United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls, 1991). Thomas takes the cases one by one, delivering an eye-opening reference for lay readers.
Although the author’s well-delineated examples will ring outrageous to modern-day ears, she reminds us how much there is still to be achieved.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-28005-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 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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