Sharma's experiences not only support the idea that “when you teach a woman to fish, everyone eats,” but also serve as an...
An international women’s issues advocate tells the story of how females all over the developing world are seeking to improve their economic prospects and create better futures for themselves and their families.
Women Thrive Worldwide founder Sharma traveled to three regions in the developing world—Southeast Asia, Central America and West Africa—to see how everyday women dealt with poverty. Her goal was to not just understand what it meant to live on $1 or less per day like the estimated 1.3 billion people in the world who do so. It was also to see the specific social, political and economic forces that kept women, who are primary caregivers and important breadwinners for their families throughout the developing world, down. In Sri Lanka, Sharma witnessed the informal economic system that allowed women to work from home while also ruthlessly exploiting them. At the same time, she also saw individual companies that treated women workers fairly and created hope for thousands of people. In Honduras, she observed how a farm association that pledged to support peasant women had taken advantage of them. With Sharma's help, these females fought back and won. In Burkina Faso, she watched as women struggled against institutionalized sexism to create some of the most progressive national gender policies anywhere in the developing world. Sharma also listened to stories from courageous women who faced violence, humiliation and domestic abuse but had nevertheless managed to survive and even thrive. No matter where in the world poor women lived, they all shared one desire: that their children receive the education they did not have “to live well…and be free from the illiteracy, deprivation and suffering they have endured.”
Sharma's experiences not only support the idea that “when you teach a woman to fish, everyone eats,” but also serve as an aggressive call to action for anyone who cares about ending global poverty.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27858-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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