Affecting and inspiring.
The first book from the noted philanthropist focuses on women’s empowerment.
Gates explains that her public advocacy began with the conviction that women need the tools to let them decide for themselves when and whether to have children. But she soon realized that activism around discrete topics—e.g., contraception or girls’ access to school—was not enough: She needed to speak up for women in general. While it has long been understood that empowered women are key to the health of any community, in the author’s hands, the idea feels fresh, or at least energized. Even though she confesses that she didn’t always consider herself a feminist and that she found the idea of working for a wider women’s agenda overwhelming, Gates is a down-to-earth, likable narrator, and she has an eye for gut-wrenching tales. She introduces us to 11-year-old Selam, who spent a day cheerfully helping her mother prepare for a party only to be told, that evening, that she was to be married that night; and Meena, who, upon meeting Gates, told her she was unable to raise her two children and asked Gates to take the children home with her. Meena said that while she eventually learned about family planning, the education came “too late.” Unsurprisingly, the author, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and master’s in business from Duke, thinks that continuing to work on new technologies that can improve human lives is important, but just as crucial is the development of new and better “delivery systems.” What distinguishes this book from so many other depictions of women’s struggles around the globe is the author’s ability to connect Meena and Selam with women in white-collar workplaces in the U.S. Gates doesn’t just want rural farms to be rid of bias; she also wants offices in major cities to be “compatible with family life.”
Affecting and inspiring.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31357-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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