A brisk, authoritative, and timely history.
The social, cultural, and legal battle against sexual harassment has raged for 50 years.
Drawing on interviews, histories, and abundant news articles, Hirshman (Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World, 2015, etc.) offers a savvy and well-informed history of women’s decadeslong fight against sexual abuse and harassment from the 1960s, when there was “no legal category for sexual harassment,” to the outburst of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements and the triumph of women candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Catharine MacKinnon emerges as a driving force in the struggle. As a Yale Law School student, she argued that sexual harassment was discrimination, prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time, legal decisions in harassment cases were “motivated by a vision of women, collectively, as inferior to their male counterparts and subject to their whims.” In 1979, MacKinnon published her groundbreaking Sexual Harassment of Working Women, which Hirshman praises as “a little book that started a big war.” Hirshman’s inventory of crucial moments in women’s rights includes Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas before a judiciary committee chaired by Joe Biden, who showed Hill no sympathy. Thomas’ confirmation spurred women to enter—and win—political races in 1992, writes the author. But in sexual matters, many feminists—including icon Gloria Steinem—argued for a liberal, celebratory view of workplace sex, including sex between individuals of vastly unequal power—such as Bill Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. By defending her husband, Hillary Clinton herself, purportedly a human rights advocate, “got to decide when the women in her husband’s sphere were political subjects, with human rights.” The public conversation over sexual harassment was ignited by websites like Bitch, Feministing, and Salon’s Broadsheet and by the media’s coverage of issues such as date rape, the legal meaning of “consent,” and suits against prominent and powerful men. Hashtag activism, Hirshman asserts, allows women to be “literally inventors of their own empowerment.”
A brisk, authoritative, and timely history.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-56644-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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