A balanced consideration of a timely issue.
An accessible investigation of sexual assault.
The #MeToo movement, writes Canadian journalist Doolittle, has raised “tough questions” about sexual assault: “When does an action cross the line? What should happen to those who have committed harm? What exactly should the courts be doing differently? How do you reconcile a victim’s right to call out the abuser with an accused person’s right to self-defence and a fair hearing?” Drawing on interviews with more than 100 experts (including legal scholars, trauma specialists, attorneys, nurses, and police officers) and deep investigations of 54 cases, Doolittle offers a cleareyed, thorough examination of the handling of sexual assault cases by police and the courts in Canada and the U.S. She discovered that a majority of sexual assault allegations were deemed “unfounded”—a police term that means the detective thinks the accusation is either false or baseless. Complainants were often given lectures about drinking too much, accused of being promiscuous, or dismissed as lying. “The threat of the lying woman looms large in our culture,” writes the author, and many detectives, lawyers, and judges are not familiar with the “neurobiology of trauma,” which may manifest itself as gaps and inconsistencies in a complainant’s narrative. Moreover, complainants are often intimidated by assumptions arising from what she calls “rape culture”: “judging women for wearing revealing clothing and measuring masculinity in terms of sexual conquest.” Even in cases that made it to court, “not-so-subtle sexism” was likely to lead to acquittals of the accused. Doolittle reveals myriad social, cultural, and psychological complexities surrounding sexual assault: for example, about the definition of consent and the line between an ethical violation and a legal one when it comes to consent. The author respectfully considers backlash against #MeToo, even from feminists, accusing the movement of casting women “as helpless victims with no agency, incapable of standing up for themselves.”
A balanced consideration of a timely issue.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-1-58642-289-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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