On the whole, a generous, revealing, honest account.
An inspiring story of life behind bars.
In 1988, Trounstine began to teach acting to a group of women inmates at a Massachusetts prison. She began tentatively, an oddball experiment in a hard-to-crack place, but her attempts were successful: not only did she learn, as the old saw goes, that the teacher learns as much from her students as they learn from her, she realized that even in jail, theater can transform lives. The Taming of the Shrew moves Kit to think about the lover she would have followed anywhere (until, “kaboom,” he left her). Gloria complains that Shakespeare is “white man’s theater” (Trounstine suggests that it’s not, as long as a mixed-race group of women are performing it). Dolly, moved by The Merchant of Venice and its pound of flesh, says she would die for a friend. Rose connects with Shylock—after reciting his famous monologue, she says that she knows he is hurt, even though he is trying to cover up his pain with anger. Bertie plays Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, and afterwards she writes in her journal, “I know now I am somebody.” We learn not only what the women think of Shakespeare, but also what they think of their prison lives. Dolly goes to Shattuck (Boston’s hospital for the incarcerated) for a breast exam, but, after spending all day in a holding cell, she never gets to see a doctor. And we learn some shocking details about the inmates themselves: the beautiful, sassy, Jamaican Bertie (whose journal entries occasionally sound like Emily Dickinson) killed her four-month-old baby. Occasionally Trounstine descends into pop-psychology victimization (the women here were invariably hurt by a “society that favors others”), but for the most part she is clearheaded and unsentimental.
On the whole, a generous, revealing, honest account.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-24660-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
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