Useful for advocates of legalizing prostitution but unlikely to make converts to the cause.
Current and former sex workers sound off in a collection of essays edited by West, a former professional dominatrix with a doctorate in gender studies.
In this hit-or-miss gathering, West, with the assistance of Horn, brings together original writing and reprints from Tits and Sass and other media. Without arguing that the U.S. should legalize prostitution, contributors show the many forms of harm that result from criminalizing it. Veteran sex workers set limits on acts they will perform, but clients often cross boundaries and claim that assaults—ranging from dangerous chokeholds to rape—were part of BDSM or other agreed-on services. Victims who report such crimes risk prosecution, self-incriminations, or, if they work in pornography, blacklisting in the industry. Some of the most disturbing essays involve the police, who until recently could legally have sex with prostitutes they were investigating—in 2017, Michigan became the last state to outlaw the practice. Other entries fault the anti–human-trafficking law known as FOSTA-SESTA, which shut down the sex-marketplace website Backpage but deprived sex workers of “independence, safety, and community online.” Some show how workers are adapting to the coronavirus pandemic with apps and video calls. In weaker essays, contributors strike chirpy notes on why they’ve leaned into sex work, using clichés about “empowerment” and the “flexible schedule” it allows. These gauzy sections dilute the impact of harder-hitting material on sex workers’ need for dignity and rights, and the book would have benefited from hard data on the high incidence of crimes against sex workers and the public health benefits to countries that have legalized prostitution. Absent such facts, the book has much anecdotal material of interest to supporters of decriminalization, but it isn’t likely to change minds on the issue.
Useful for advocates of legalizing prostitution but unlikely to make converts to the cause.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-55861-285-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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