A cleareyed and impassioned plea for a just world.
Revising the meaning and goals of feminism.
Bianco, a cultural critic and editor at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, makes her book debut with a bold and compelling critique of feminism’s focus on equality. Describing herself as “a capital-A, capital-F Angry Feminist,” the author asserts that women have been duped into believing “a myth perpetuated to coax women into complicity with their oppression.” What have been identified as political, economic, or social inequalities, she claims, “are nothing but the measured effects of the discrimination of difference in relation to the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy.” The term equality, she contends, is unclear, with different meanings for men and women, for those with power and those without. Rather than adopt a politics that aims for attainment of the same rights, privileges, and power as white men, Bianco proposes that feminists aim to dismantle these patriarchal institutions and engage in embracing freedom. Freedom of body, mind, and movement, she asserts, involves “an ongoing process of self-creation and world-building rooted in accountability and care.” Accountability, which she sees as “the critical difference between white freedom and feminist freedom,” is central to her argument. Feminism must become “an ethics from which a politics emerges,” a value system grounded in respect, integrity, and collective well-being. Bianco draws on feminist scholars and critics—Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson, to name a few—as well as her own experiences as a 40-something Harvard-educated white woman, lesbian, and athlete to discuss salient issues for women’s lives, such as abortion, gender, sexuality, queer identity, race, capitalism, and assisted death. Practicing freedom, she writes, can counter the “equality mindset” that posits a “hierarchical opposition of man above woman” and instead “can create a world that values the dignity, belonging, and joy of all people.”
A cleareyed and impassioned plea for a just world.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781541702424
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
