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 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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