An insightful and intimate look at the last all-male military college’s struggle to prepare for and assimilate women into its corps of cadets.
Laura Brodie introduces herself to her readers as the wife of the Virginia Military Institute band director; she then adds that she is a feminist with a PhD (in English) from the University of Virginia and served on one of the oversight committees for the integration of women into VMI’s corps of cadets in 1996. The tension of producing an intellectually honest history of the military university’s growing pains while simultaneously being a full-fledged member of that institution’s “family” could have turned this book into an empty panegyric to VMI’s martial subculture. Instead, Brodie harnesses that tension to evoke the deeper cultural currents that underlie the integration of women into traditional male strongholds. She traces VMI’s dedication to assimilating women and its discomfort with addressing the practical problems of facilities, cadet slang, and physical fitness tests with balanced and humorous anecdotes: her narrative of the women’s edgy reception, their demanding training, and the identity issues with which they struggled during their transformation into VMI cadets is equally engaging. The very intimacy that lends the book its authenticity also produces its limitations, however. Brodie downplays the societal implications of VMI’s integration in order to deeply explore its effects on the college’s unique fraternal culture. Even so, Brodie’s insider awareness of the outlandish textures of VMI’s culture, and her exhaustive interviews of cadets and faculty create a solid oral history which offers a unique point of view on the struggle to assimilate time-honored traditions with progressive values.
An engaging oral history that offers a snapshot of how far American military culture has come in accepting women and suggests the complexities involved in the nation’s continuing struggle with issues of gender and the military.Pub Date: May 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40614-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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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