This is an important and compelling book that calls for a feminist reordering of our society: it may make women shudder, but...
The feminist book par excellence, by one of the Movement's leading theoreticians, about the crime only males can commit--rape.
From a feudal lord's "first night" privileges with his female serfs to a Southern plantation owner's easy access to his slaves, from ancient Troy to Vietnamese hamlets, everywhere soldiers have marched into conquered lands, the strong and the rich have systematically oppressed the weak and the poor, preferably (but not always) those of other races, creeds or nationalities, usually women, but also slightly built young men in prisons. Brownmiller shows how rape has its genesis in power (and the need to preserve the appearance of power) rather than eroticism. It is as much a function of the strange byways of male dominance and bonding as it is an expression of contempt for the female victim: early Babylonian law was concerned with the loss of the bride price associated with the marriage of an "unspoiled" virgin; rape was avenged not by punishing the rapist, but by violating his wife in turn. And on up through the present, where the author demolishes many of the convenient male myths concerning the crime by using law enforcement statistics from a variety of locales. Once and for all she lays to rest the claims that rape charges are unfounded (two percent of the time, the same as for other felonies), that women "precipitate" rape by provocative behavior (less often than any other major crime), that rape victims are often prostitutes deprived of a fee (one percent of the time), that resistance increases the chance of physical harm (it doesn't), that rapists are shy, lonely men with inadequate sex lives (they're violence-prone criminals, usually with a record, who rape in groups nearly half of the time).
This is an important and compelling book that calls for a feminist reordering of our society: it may make women shudder, but it will also make them think--and possibly rage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1975
ISBN: 9780449908204
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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
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