A cogent sociological analysis.
A passionate call for societal support for mothers.
Melding reportage and memoir, journalist, novelist, and essayist Davis examines the “powerful and persistent myth and archetype” of a housewife: a “stay-at-home mom” living among suburban “tract houses and sodded lawns.” To the author, that image seemed inaccurate when she became a mother hoping to combine her writing career with caring for her child. How, she wondered, could those “seemingly opposing trajectories…peacefully coexist”? Her search for an answer proved both illuminating and troubling. The role of the housewife, she discovered, has evolved dramatically throughout history. In Paleolithic times, the model of “man-the-hunter, woman-the-gatherer” was caused less by biological difference than changing ecological conditions; gender roles were fluid, depending on a community’s needs. Davis underscores the importance of interdependence: From colonial America through the 19th century, women relegated to the domestic sphere were supported by grandmothers and aunts, friends, and neighbors. In the 1930s, many working-class housewives banded together in strikes and boycotts. The 1950s housewife, isolated from family and a supportive community, “was an anomaly, an aberration, constructed and crafted by multiple economic, political, ideological, and infrastructural forces: appliance manufacturers, mortgage subsidies, governmental agencies, and housing developers among them.” Davis addresses the concerns of Black mothers, single and married, as well as same-sex couples and trans women, to make a case for overarching needs. For the past 50 years, meeting those needs has been a continuing, controversial policy issue. As the only developed country without national paid parental leave, the U.S. shortchanges both women and men. Rather than insist that women “personally, individually solve problems that should rightly be addressed societally, structurally,” legislators must acknowledge the long history of interdependence that has served families and “to enact policies that both allow women to be housewives yet build a society in which no woman has to be one.”
A cogent sociological analysis.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781538722886
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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