A vital celebration of loving.
An examination of how to make heterosexual love equitable.
In a spirited social critique, French feminist Chollet draws on movies, TV, novels, advertisements, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine impediments to fulfilling experiences of heterosexual love. Real, reciprocal love, she believes, feels like a gift, “an intoxicating bond, an immediate and crazily benevolent intimacy with someone who could have been totally unknown to us.” Yet depictions of love in popular culture have undermined that benevolent intimacy by presenting women as weak, vulnerable, and intellectually inferior and fueling male fantasies of women as compliant bodies, silent and docile. “By deluging girls and women with romances,” Chollet writes, “by vaunting the charms and importance of the presence of a man in their lives, they are encouraged to accept their traditional role as caregivers.” Patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and imperialism have validated the image of the domineering man who takes “sexual appropriation of the female body.” The author shows how this depiction helps to explain women’s attraction to male killers and even to the exploitative figure of the male artist or writer, “whose creative process justifies the worst actions against those close to him.” Chollet suggests ways for women to revise the romance narrative by reexamining their own sexual desires, perhaps by subverting the idea of domination. In underscoring women’s need for independence, the author suggests non-cohabitation, which, among other benefits, eliminates the problem of sharing domestic tasks. For Chollet, a happily loved woman, financially independent and childless by choice, non-cohabitation may fit her life more than it would others’. Nevertheless, she is an impassioned advocate of love, urging readers “to breathe life back into it, by pulverizing both the bourgeois straightjacket of the obligatory trajectory of romance, as well as the equally conventional (and limiting) view of destructive passion.”
A vital celebration of loving.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250285720
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
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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