A well-researched and insightful guide to building long-lasting coalitions.
Dwidar, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, presents a detailed examination of intersectional advocacy in society and the workplace.
In her nonfiction debut, the author studies the structures and workings of advocacy groups dedicated to intersectional social justice, concentrating on both the importance coalition-building and its challenges. Her studies indicate that building bonds between allied social justice organizations significantly increases their influence. However, she warns that research shows that coalition-building, while effective, isn’t the only key to long-term success, as the coalitions themselves, and not just their constituent groups, must have clearly demarcated structures; they must be crystal-clear on questions such as: “Who decides what? Who contributes what? and Who gets what?” This kind of clarity lends itself to what Dwidar views as one of the main priorities of social justice organizations: securing funding. In a densely packed and extensively researched series of chapters, complete with charts and graphs, she effectively offers three basic rules for such coalitions: Develop a clear architecture of decision-making (“you should have difficult conversations about who is in the coalition and who is in charge of it”); include diverse groups in any coalition, despite the risks of altering the balance of power sharing; and commit to longer-term, “less restrictive” funding. The main strength of Dwidar’s book is its extensive grounding in data and research, rather than anecdotes, but a great secondary strength is the author’s willingness to acknowledge how advocacy groups can be distracted by counterproductive infighting. As such, members of such coalitions are sure to find her conclusions to be enlightening.
A well-researched and insightful guide to building long-lasting coalitions.Pub Date: June 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780226840383
Page Count: 225
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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