One doesn’t have to be as far left as most of these essayists to see the contradictions in the subject’s credentials as a...
A collection of essays from radical activists and academics eviscerating Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism.
In “The Great Ambivalence,” professor Tressie McMillan Cottom confesses, “I want to trust Hillary Clinton more than I do,” which is a far more positive perspective on Clinton than the other essays display. As editor Featherstone (Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers Rights at Wal-Mart, 2004, etc.) and contributor Amber A’Lee Frost argue in the introduction, “feminism is not an anatomical Super Bowl in which all adherents root for Team Vagina. Instead, feminism is a set of political ideas, or several sets of political ideas that are often wildly at odds. This book itself advances a vociferous disagreement with the type of feminism that has produced and sustained Hillary Rodham Clinton.” The charges against her range from her board membership with the anti-union Wal-Mart to her hawkishness as “the administration’s most vociferous advocate for military action” to her and her husband’s pivotal roles with the Democratic Leadership Council, which positioned the party away from liberal verities and toward a more conservative centrism. None of the charges are particularly revelatory, but the framing of them as a feminist critique of a feminist candidate can be devastating. Clinton’s support of so-called “welfare reform” and the war on drugs has been brutal toward minority women, though Clinton herself seems to separate gender issues from ones concerning race. In the concluding “Beyond Hillary,” feminist theorist Zillah Eisenstein writes, “Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism—power feminism, imperial feminism, white ruling-class feminism—are [sic] not the answer to this moment of crisis. And the answer must be about so much more than gender.” Lest she emerge from these pages as the Lady Macbeth of presidential politics, the essays have plenty of ammunition reserved for her husband and take some shots at the current president.
One doesn’t have to be as far left as most of these essayists to see the contradictions in the subject’s credentials as a progressive feminist.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78478-461-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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