While repetitive in places, this work delivers a heartfelt attack on an often overlooked topic.
A writer examines the horrors of male circumcision.
Debut author Jackson explains early on in his autobiographical book that he has quite a few issues with circumcision, including the seemingly standard practice of performing the procedure on male infants in the United States. One of his main arguments is that in the modern-day world, circumcision serves no real purpose and amounts to “sexual mutilation.” And if one truly wants to be circumcised, why not let that individual make the decision as a consenting adult rather than a defenseless child? The volume tells not so much the story of circumcision in general (though a later chapter addresses the work of an early 20th-century advocate named Dr. Peter Charles Remondino) as the author’s personal tale. And it is a story fraught with family trauma, angry urologists, and painful cosmetic surgery. The author details his own apathetic attitude toward religion as well as the struggles he and his husband have faced in a world that has often been unkind to their status as a gay married couple. To say that Jackson’s words are raw would be an understatement. Readers who feel squeamish at the thought of someone’s intricate “taping” routine to try to overcome his circumcision are unlikely to get far in the book. The author’s anger is palpable, though his hostility can become monotonous. His lengthy attack on Remondino (“If circumcision cures all mental illness, then Dr. Remondino’s own cropped penis should have rendered him less of a moron”) could have been summed up more succinctly. Yet Jackson’s honesty provides a new way of looking at a practice that is rarely discussed. In the end, this intriguing subject is not only brought to light, but also done so in an impassioned way.
While repetitive in places, this work delivers a heartfelt attack on an often overlooked topic. (notes)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73455-580-6
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Hookona Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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