A magnificent, norm-shattering work.
A memoir of sexual violence told in four parts.
Between 2012 and 2014, Hood was raped three times, a devastatingly condensed succession of assaults connected only by their victim. Each of these incidents anchors a section of Hood’s text, which shifts from third to first to second person as the author tries to make sense of the before, during, and after of these cuts of trauma. With bracing detail, a practiced poetic consciousness, and something like foreboding mysticism, she excavates the layers of both her personal experience and what it reflects about sexualized violence against women generally and transwomen in particular. Hood leans into both the horror of the acts and the chaos of the fallout between them, marked with excessive drinking and drug use, starvation, and casual and risky sex—and by increasing dissociation and despair. The specific, palpable darkness of her telling holds the reader’s gaze on Hood’s individual story even as she pitches these details against a broader social inquiry that acknowledges the ubiquity and dailiness of rape and trauma. Her fourth, final section gathers around her work to process and name what happened to her as rape, synthesizing and situating these most recent experiences of sexual violence within her history and identity. Here, the artistic intentionality of Hood’s narration meets the genius of her project. She is strikingly aware of the landscape of literary confessional, regarding rape in particular, into which she is preparing to release her story and sits on a plane of meta-analysis that not only considers womanhood, sensuality, and victimization, but also closely inspects how these things are spoken and written about. She deftly carves into the tensions between particularity and exceptionality, arc and causality, how we tell stories of suffering and why we tell them to reimagine her personhood and reorient readers toward empathy.
A magnificent, norm-shattering work.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593700976
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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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