An intimate, searing report from the frontlines of refugee women’s empowerment.
Part gut-wrenching analysis, part heartfelt memoir.
The average refugee spends roughly 20 years displaced, writes Krause-Vilmar—“two decades of waiting, of stitching together a semblance of life in the margins.” The former CEO of the nonprofit Upwardly Global—and the daughter of a single, immigrant mother—she has studied the lives of the women who spend that time waiting: how they survive, what their homes look like, how they manage to send their kids to school amid crushing poverty. What she finds is discrimination: 58% of women work in the world’s informal economy with no contracts, taxes, or labor laws to protect them. But when given the chance to build their own businesses, women’s lives transform—like the kemis, the traditional Ethiopian dress that one woman, Aamina, wears in Nairobi: “its seams repeatedly stitched and reinforced with care,” Krause-Vilmar writes. The book is something like this as well, as it carefully weaves together stories of economic empowerment. Among them: A church savings group in a Nairobi slum pools money for female businesses, like Aamina’s bakery, and clandestine gatherings of Somali women sell Chinese goods in Johannesburg. But even if these women work harder “than most people ever will,” it’s never enough, the author observes. She introduces us to Aisha, a home-health aid in the Bronx who scrapes by on $1,500 a month. (“Immigrant women with master’s degrees earn just 55 cents for every dollar earned by U.S.-born men,” Krause-Vilmar notes.) Aisha fled war, only to enter a “deeply rigged system,” trapping her in the same cycle that her mother, a “tea lady,” had known in Khartoum. Like Ayaan, who won financial independence from her husband through divorce, these women need more legal rights to close the gap with others. “Childcare, healthcare, safe transportation, legal pathways to work, these are not mere supports but rights that create possibility,” Krause-Vilmar writes. “They transform the landscape of what a woman can choose, and who she can become.”
An intimate, searing report from the frontlines of refugee women’s empowerment.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250828026
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Moment of Life Books/Flatiron
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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