A gripping story that brings home the point that India may be “the worst place in the world to be a woman.”
A modern-day Rashomon that offers multiple views of the widely publicized deaths of two young women in rural India.
In the summer of 2014, two teenagers, whom Faleiro calls Padma and Lalli, left their homes in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh, walking to a nearby orchard. Not long after, they were found hanging from a tree. An autopsy was inconclusive, but it seemed likely that the girls had been raped. Consequently, the village was swept up in a vortex of contending views on religion, caste, gender roles, women’s rights, and other thorny issues, all cogently explored by the author. The principal suspects were members of a low caste. “Their lives had been dismantled,” writes Faleiro, a sympathetic yet unrelenting investigator. “And not one politician, they said, not even one of their own, had come to see them, never mind offer them assistance of any sort….This is what it meant to be poor.” Other issues were at play, including the fact that the girls had dared use their cellphones in public—an act that proved, according to a society where women are untrustworthy, that they were seeking dangerous liaisons. As Faleiro carefully documents, the disappearance of the girls was not extraordinary: “In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh, accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India.” In a recent case, a wealthy businessman had murdered at least 17 people, some of them children, whose disappearances the police had not paid attention to precisely because they were poor. Padma’s and Lalli’s graves suffered a final indignity during a devastating flood, and while their case seems to resist definitive resolution, it shows that, “for the poor, who have always suffered the most, India hasn’t changed all that much.”
A gripping story that brings home the point that India may be “the worst place in the world to be a woman.”Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5820-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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