Women of all persuasions will appreciate Armstrong’s in-depth, passionate exploration of this important topic.
A Canadian journalist and human rights activist chronicles the acts of empowerment undertaken by women and girls across the globe against inequities and acts of brutality, which have been perpetrated against them for decades.
After 25 years of reporting on the dehumanizing conditions confronting females around the world, Armstrong (Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan's Women, 2008, etc.) sensed a shift in attitudes concerning their rights. “Until recently,” she writes, “the oppression and abuse and second-class citizenship that we endured were seen as women’s immutable lot in life, dictated by culture and religion. Now that treatment is seen as symptomatic of a failed economy, the consequences of sidelining half the world’s population.” The author highlights the attitudes and actions taken by leaders, policymakers, Nobel Prize winners and countless individual women and girls intent on creating change. She also confronts the crime of rape, noting that it “continues to be the ugly foundation of women’s story of change.” Citing brutal cases and staggering statistics from around the world—e.g., “in Kenya a girl child is raped every thirty minutes; some are as young as three months old”—Armstrong exposes horrid acts of violence coupled with little or no punishment for perpetrators. She also devotes a chapter to religion, exploring how, in nearly every religion, modern fundamentalists continue to cling to antiquated rules and practices. Armstrong exposes the truths surrounding the cultural contradictions that support honor killings and female genital mutilation, and she decries the cycle of poverty that keeps women underemployed, delaying a country’s economic and social advancement. “The changes I describe in this book are not about the triumph of women over men, Western values over Eastern, or one religion over another,” she writes. “They’re aimed at solving the world’s most intractable problems—poverty, conflict, and violence.”
Women of all persuasions will appreciate Armstrong’s in-depth, passionate exploration of this important topic.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04528-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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