An exposé of domestic abuse that portrays other countries more convincingly than it does the U.S.
An Australian journalist finds countless faults with how society treats those who endure domestic violence.
Hill is all over the map, literally and figuratively, in this exploration of how “victims of domestic abuse have been blamed by the public, maligned by the justice system, and pathologized by psychiatrists.” After winning the Stella Prize for the Australian edition, the author has revised the book heavily for the North American market, and she finds antecedents for homegrown domestic abuse in the “deeply patriarchal and deeply sexist” views of the Puritans. Hill has a wealth of insight into why women stay with abusive partners; how the police and courts fail those who have suffered; the unique vulnerabilities of Aboriginal people; and the varied types of “coercive controllers,” who need more than one-size-fits-all “anger management” programs. The author also finds innovative solutions in countries including Argentina, which has special police stations for women, resembling living rooms with play spaces for children, where female victims find under one roof all the services they need—“lawyers, social workers, psychologists.” Hill stumbles, however, in analyzing the U.S., most notably when she suggests that in America, as elsewhere, “2014 will likely stand as the year when the Western world finally started taking men’s violence against women seriously,” in part because that was the year that NFL star Ray Rice assaulted his fiancee, Janay Palmer. In fact, as Rachel Louise Snyder writes in the excellent No Visible Bruises, the U.S. watershed came two decades earlier, when “Nicole Brown Simpson became the face of a new kind of victim” and Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. Hill’s global perspective is valuable—as is a chapter on women who abuse men—but Snyder’s book has a firmer grasp of the American issues.
An exposé of domestic abuse that portrays other countries more convincingly than it does the U.S.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72822-226-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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