An invigorating blueprint for building a better world—this book is sure to inspire readers.
An American nonprofit executive discusses the global value of unlocking female potential.
Since 2017, Quam has been the president and CEO of Pathfinder, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing access to sexual and reproductive health services and creating opportunities for women and their communities to reach their full potential. In this book, she expounds upon Pathfinder’s mission, observing that without access to reproductive health services, the potential of women and girls is stymied, a net negative for society. The author deftly connects climate change, refugee crises, and inadequate health care systems to demonstrate how women are crucial to addressing each problem. (“Unlocking the talent, skills, and energy of the world’s women is the big move that can catalyze global progress in the twenty-first century.”) The book’s first section describes Pathfinder’s history, including a reckoning with founder Clarence Gamble’s eugenicist beliefs. The second highlights some of the author’s recent work, such as improving maternal health care services, integrating reproductive health care with other local health services, and striving to close the technology gender divide. Quam then looks to the future, discussing the need to ensure the livelihoods of young people by providing them with reproductive education, expanding fertility health services globally, and reorganizing Pathfinder to be a country-led organization. The author writes with the energy and enthusiasm of someone accustomed to moving mountains to achieve one’s goals. She asserts that empowering women is a necessary global good and has the data and experience to back it up. The effect of this book is galvanizing, especially in the current political climate, where it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the many challenges the world faces. “We are, I think, well aware of what can go wrong. Less so about what could go right.” This line, which would seem like a platitude from another author, lands differently coming from a woman whose work has improved thousands of lives.
An invigorating blueprint for building a better world—this book is sure to inspire readers.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798887500805
Page Count: 208
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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