A maddening, well-documented account of crime without punishment even as violence against women continues unabated.
A scathing examination of American rape culture, promoted and abetted by athletics.
Documentary filmmaker Schwartzman focuses on an incident that occurred in 2012 in Steubenville, a small town in the “football-obsessed state of Ohio.” High school football players threw a party in which some of them repeatedly raped an intoxicated young woman—and, moreover, boasted of the event on social media as it was happening. “As a result of their tweets and texts,” writes the author, “in the aftermath they couldn’t deny what had happened.” That didn’t keep their coaches and other school officials from trying to cover up the rape, which later led to grand jury indictments—but, unsurprisingly, only the mildest of punishments for the rapists. Therein, Schwartzman observes, lies the crux of a toxic culture that explains away crimes against women as the product of youthful exuberance and adrenaline. In the grim industrial town in which the crime occurred, gridiron success affords the possibility of escape via college scholarships, and locals tend to be disinclined to take that possibility away over what is explained away as teenage hijinks. Indeed, in a local bar, Schwartzman overheard “men [who] grumbled with resentment about trumped-up charges and girls who deserved what they got.” Small wonder, given such attitudes, that it’s so difficult to enact effective policies to combat rape culture, including simple sex education. The people Schwartzman encountered in town were less concerned with the fact of gang rape than with “negative attention about the football program.” Furthermore, the women of Steubenville expressed their tacit support by voting for Donald Trump in 2016. “Women’s supposed solidarity around being potential victims of sexual violence was trumped by their allegiance to whiteness, and their own gender bias,” writes Schwartzman. Meanwhile, the perpetrators earned their scholarships, lauded as “good kids, good football players,” and rape culture rolls on.
A maddening, well-documented account of crime without punishment even as violence against women continues unabated.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-306-92436-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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