Impassioned testimony to women’s determination.
Profiles of Afghan women who are fighting against repression.
Human rights activist, filmmaker, and artist Shahalimi (b. 1973) fled from Afghanistan with her widowed mother and three siblings in 1985, first to Pakistan and then to Canada. Over four years, beginning in 2014, she made several trips back, interviewing women for her first book, Where Courage Carries the Soul (2017). Banned from the country after its publication in Germany, Shahalimi defiantly continued her project, and in less than two months, she conducted, transcribed, edited, and translated the interviews that comprise this moving collection. The 13 women she profiles share outrage at the Taliban, which brutally restricts women’s lives. As Margaret Atwood notes in her introduction, that puritanical theocracy informed her creation of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. Like Shahalimi, many women left as refugees. “My education almost certainly would have ended in 1996, in the fourth grade, with the invasion of the Taliban,” writes Hila Limar, if she had not grown up in Germany. Now she is an architect and activist affiliated with Visions for Children, an organization that has built seven schools in Afghanistan. Many activists have risked their lives. For example, Razia Barakzai, who initiated the first women’s protests after the fall of Kabul, has received “unequivocal death threats from the Taliban.” When singer Aryana Sayeed made an unveiled performance on The Voice in 2013, “a group of clerics issued a fatwa against her on TV, promising entry into heaven to whoever could decapitate her.” All of these women are devoted to empowerment. Fereshteh Forough founded the first computer-coding school for girls; Mariam Safi founded a Kabul-based institute for community development; Manizha Wafeq’s Peace Through Business program has trained and mentored more than 600 women entrepreneurs. “When people ask me if the Taliban has changed,” Wafeq notes, “I tell them it has not. It is our women who have changed.” As artist Rada Akbar puts it, “I know that in every home in Afghanistan there lives…a superwoman.”
Impassioned testimony to women’s determination.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-47290-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A sharp, entertaining view of the news media from one of its star players.
The veteran newscaster reflects on her triumphs and hardships, both professional and private.
In this eagerly anticipated memoir, Couric (b. 1957) transforms the events of her long, illustrious career into an immensely readable story—a legacy-preserving exercise, for sure, yet judiciously polished and insightful, several notches above the fray of typical celebrity memoirs. The narrative unfolds through a series of lean chapters as she recounts the many career ascendency steps that led to her massively successful run on the Today Show and comparably disappointing stints as CBS Evening News anchor, talk show host, and Yahoo’s Global News Anchor. On the personal front, the author is candid in her recollections about her midlife adventures in the dating scene and deeply sorrowful and affecting regarding the experience of losing her husband to colon cancer as well as the deaths of other beloved family members, including her sister and parents. Throughout, Couric maintains a sharp yet cool-headed perspective on the broadcast news industry and its many outsized personalities and even how her celebrated role has diminished in recent years. “It’s AN ADJUSTMENT when the white-hot spotlight moves on,” she writes. “The ego gratification of being the It girl is intoxicating (toxic being the root of the word). When that starts to fade, it takes some getting used to—at least it did for me.” Readers who can recall when network news coverage and morning shows were not only relevant, but powerfully influential forces will be particularly drawn to Couric’s insights as she tracks how the media has evolved over recent decades and reflects on the negative effects of the increasing shift away from reliable sources of informed news coverage. The author also discusses recent important cultural and social revolutions, casting light on issues of race and sexual orientation, sexism, and the predatory behavior that led to the #MeToo movement. In that vein, she expresses her disillusionment with former co-host and friend Matt Lauer.
A sharp, entertaining view of the news media from one of its star players.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-53586-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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