While some readers may suggest that equality has arrived and gender no longer matters, this book, which should have wide...
A writer, broadcaster, and feminist activist exposes a global knowledge gap in data pertaining to gender.
Criado Perez (Do It Like a Woman…and Change the World, 2015), who was named Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year in Britain in 2013, takes on the challenge of telling the story of the unknown, addressing countless ways in which data about women have been—and continue to be—left out of research that informs everything from daily life to public policy. The author provides an incisive narrative paced more like a novel than a scientific study, offering digestible information with a sharp dose of wit. From heart attack symptoms to usage of public transportation, women’s patterns don’t always replicate men’s. However, like algorithms seeking simplicity, researchers may set aside differences as “atypical,” thus missing the data-rich point that while women’s perspectives aren’t necessarily problematic, ignoring them is. Painting a portrait out of negative space—this is “a story about absence—and that sometimes makes it hard to write about”—Criado Perez draws attention to information gaps in fields as diverse as urban planning, tax law, design, medicine, technology, disaster relief efforts, and politics. In focusing on how research has ignored, obscured, or failed to address gender differences, the author offers a balance of statistics, provocative questions, and concise assessments of systemic bias and how to address it. She pinpoints how the personal and the political intersect in these data gaps, providing a lens to interrogate gender-neutral defaults and reveling in examples of how including women (sometimes a single woman) quickly “solves” persistent problems. In clear language, the author builds a strong case for greater inclusion with this thoughtful and surprisingly humorous view of institutional bias and gendered information gaps.
While some readers may suggest that equality has arrived and gender no longer matters, this book, which should have wide popular appeal, is a solid corrective to that line of thought.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2907-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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