A passionate, candid, and convincing narrative of unmasking and revelation.
Exploding the profound hypocrisy of sexual life in Morocco.
As Slimani amply shows, Morocco is a country obsessed with sex, but premarital sex, adultery, abortion, prostitution, and homosexuality are all illegal—and, at the same time, rampant. The author of the well-received thriller The Perfect Nanny (2018), Slimani began the project that culminated in this book while on tour in Morocco for her first novel, Adèle, the protagonist of which is a woman with a double life: a secret sex addict who struggles to experience pleasure. Slimani’s feeling that this tale was a metaphor for the collective experience of young Moroccan women proved true when, one after another, women approached her to share their own stories of hypocrisy, oppression, and shame. In explicit opposition to what she calls “Morocco’s motto”—“Do what you wish, but never talk about it”—the author collects the stories of these women and others, one more troubling and outrageous than the next, threading in her own experiences and commentary. We learn that since “virginity is an obsession in Morocco and throughout the Arab world,” girls who have had sex, even via rape, pretend to be virgins and have hymen restoration surgery when marriage is on the table. We hear from a therapist who suffered through two violent marriages: “My second husband…used to rape me regularly. He would bring prostitutes into our home and tell me: ‘You’re lucky…I haven’t humiliated you by taking another wife. You ought to thank me.’ ” One of Slimani’s interviewees, a theology researcher and public intellectual, asserts that though “the Koran is notably silent on questions of sex,” in broadcasts “on the Arabic satellite networks, the ulama (experts on Islamic law) never stop talking about sex.” A particularly ludicrous recent fatwa prohibited women from touching bananas and cucumbers. You can imagine why.
A passionate, candid, and convincing narrative of unmasking and revelation.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313376-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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