McCorduck and Ramsey inform, amuse, and at times disturb with these scenarios of women's possible future condition. Worried that feminist views of the future have been too ``upbeat'' or parochial, the authors map out four scenarios for women's lives across the globe over the next 20 years, ranging from virtual slavery to liberation, and from stagnation to separatism. (McCorduck and Ramsey are members of Global Business Network, a California-based organization that uses scenario planning to help identify strategies for the future). Their first scenario is a Handmaid's Talelike world in which women's sexuality is strictly controlled and exploited, their attire is restrictive, and business is ``a man's world.'' In contrast, Scenario 2 involves gender equality, the rise of goddess worship, the demasculinization of science, and the ascendancy of women in business and government. Hallmarks of the third scenario are token gains for women but overall lack of improvement. The last possibility involves women building alternative institutions, such as schools and clinics. The authors admit that the real future will probably not look like any of these, but they argue that scenarios are ``a way to plan positive change.'' And in many respects the book is helpful- -particularly in highlighting trends, including aging populations across the globe and conflicts between individual rights and group power. However, there are problems, such as the disorienting use of projections based on actual statistics in conjunction with ``testimonials'' from fictional women. Whatever the scenario, the author's biases repeatedly creep in, so that information technology is celebrated, and women (unlike men) are viewed as essentially cooperative, environmentalist, and nonlinear in their thinking. Finally, their 20-year time span seems rather short for the radical changes they describe. Nonetheless, the book reminds us of the many factors to consider when assessing gender relations, and it highlights how precious the gains of late 20th century feminism really are when taken in a global and historical context.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-48978-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.
The infamous National Security Agency contractor–turned–leaker and Russian exile presents his side of the story.
Snowden opens with an argument he carries throughout the narrative: that revealing secrets of the U.S. intelligence community was an act of civic service. “I used to work for the government,” he writes, “but now I work for the public.” He adds that making that distinction “got me into a bit of trouble at the office.” That’s an understatement. A second theme, equally ubiquitous, is that the U.S. government is a willing agent of “surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it.” The creative web fell, replaced by behemoths like Facebook and Google, which keep track of users’ comings and goings, eventually knowing more than we do about ourselves and using that data as a commodity to buy and sell. Corporations lust for the commercial possibilities of targeted advertising and influence-peddling. As for governments, that data is something that on-the-ground spies could never hope to amass. Snowden insists that he did not release NSA and CIA secrets willy-nilly when he leaked his trove of pilfered information (“the number of documents that I disclosed directly to the public is zero”); instead, it went to journalists who he trusted would act as filters, revealing the newsworthy to the public. Most of those secrets remain unpublicized even as Snowden also insists that he held much material back. He is good at describing the culture of the intelligence community and especially its IT staff, who hold the keys to the kingdom, with access to data that is otherwise available only to a tiny echelon of top brass. The secrets are generally safe, he writes, only because “tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned." He was an exception, and therein hangs most of his tale.
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-250-23723-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that...
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.
Born in 1947 in the “Negro” wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who “came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men.” Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author’s solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox’s solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author’s touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it’s an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author’s eventual re-entry into society.
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2908-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
