Difficult reading at times, but immensely well-documented and useful.
A meticulous academic study grasping the vast scope of an evolving global problem.
Journalist Hepburn (co-author: Women's Roles and Statuses the World Over, 2006, etc.) and Simon (Public Affairs and Law/American Univ.; co-author: Immigration the World Over, 2003, etc.) carefully define the many forms of human exploitation, which are shockingly prevalent from the poorest to the richest countries. The authors have sifted through documentation increasingly available—such as the Trafficking in Persons Report compiled annually by the U.S. State Department, studies by the United Nations, NGOs, newspapers and court cases—and have chosen 24 countries that offer a representative sampling of the worldwide “trafficking scenario” in terms of economics, geopolitics and culture. Many countries are only now being compelled to address the problem, and the issues of definition plague official statistics and efforts at enforcement. For example, labor trafficking (such as debt bondage) is as much a part of human exploitation as sex trafficking, though not often included in the same statistics. The authors group the countries not geographically but by a thematic commonality. For example, the United States, Japan and the United Arab Emirates are all hugely wealthy countries attractive to traffickers because of their need for inexpensive labor and the allowing of visa loopholes that encourage the enslavement of foreign migrants. The influx of victims trafficked to the Gulf Region after hurricanes Katrina and Rita provide cases in point, as does the reluctance by Japan to address its “hyperthriving” sex industry and yakuza (organized crime) network. Other themes around which countries are grouped include stateless persons, such as the hill tribe people of Thailand and the Palestinians; unrest and displacement (Iraq, Syria); gender apartheid (Iran); social hierarchy (China); and muti murder, or the abduction and murder of people for the purpose of harvesting body parts (South Africa). The authors also consider what happens to traffickers and victims after apprehension.
Difficult reading at times, but immensely well-documented and useful.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-231-16145-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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