An informative melding of memoir and research.
A well-informed look at a misunderstood disorder.
Journalist Gupta, who suffers from premenstrual dysphoric disorder, offers a close look at the medical, social, and psychological issues surrounding the diagnosis and treatment of menstrual disorders, with the hope that her findings will help the “3 to 8 percent of menstruators” who meet the criteria for this severe syndrome. Too often, she reports, “the never-ending loop of social stigma against menstruation” means that such disorders go untreated. Cultural prejudices and sexism within the medical system have led some women with PMDD—and even Gupta, at times—to doubt their experiences. Her own suffering—which included depression so severe that she became suicidal, as well as angry, violent fights with her boyfriends—persisted for over a decade before she received a diagnosis, and then she spent a year trying to find the proper medications that would alleviate the symptoms. Gupta provides an overview of the menstrual cycle and its effects on many women. Premenstrual syndrome, experienced by about 48% of women, is characterized by physical symptoms such as bloating and insomnia, as well as psychological symptoms such as mood swings and premenstrual mood exacerbation, in which preexisting psychological symptoms, such as depression, get worse during menstruation. Beginning in the 1980s, when little research on PMDD was available and it was often conflated with PMS, debate swirled over whether to include PMDD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Some medical practitioners were opposed, fearing that the diagnosis would victimize women by turning “a regular biological event into a mental disorder.” In 2013, it was finally included, and in 2019, the World Health Organization recognized PMDD as a diagnosis in its International Classification of Diseases. With ample evidence from her own life, Gupta ably depicts the reality and intensity of an affliction that rages into a monthly “emotional storm.”
An informative melding of memoir and research.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781250882899
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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