Practical, persuasive advice for raising confident, dynamic girls prepared to tackle any challenge.
How to raise girls so they have the best chance of achieving their “own success.”
Porges has experienced unquestionable success in her life: She flew missions for the Navy as a senior officer and “navigate[d] the politics of the White House and the drama of the Pentagon [to shape] U.S. counterterrorism and cybersecurity efforts under two presidents,” and she is now the head of an all-girls school outside of Philadelphia. In each of her many roles, she has encountered the discrimination so many women face when they interact with their male counterparts in the workplace and elsewhere. Here, the author gathers her hard-won tactics to help parents educate their girls about these depressingly timeless problems. “Every girl,” she writes, “should learn skills early on that empower her to be her best self…so that [they] grow into women able to apply grit, confidence, and bravery in real-world situations and effectively advocate for themselves wherever they may find themselves.” Combining case studies with her own experiences, Porges identifies core character traits that should be nurtured so that girls develop crucial skills for the modern, global world. Girls must stand up for themselves and ask for what they need and want; they must realize that competition can be a healthy endeavor and to not belittle their own skills for fear of upsetting others; they should be encouraged to use and expand their natural collaborative problem-solving abilities and be aware of the value of empathy, a good and oftentimes overlooked trait; they must be able to adapt to a wide variety of rapidly changing circumstances. Although the book contains few groundbreaking insights, the author’s credentials are impressive, and she presents her arguments and tactics to teaching them in a conversational tone that allows readers fresh insights into deep-rooted issues that have plagued women for years.
Practical, persuasive advice for raising confident, dynamic girls prepared to tackle any challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984879-14-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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