A disappointing take on what America’s working women need.
The founder of Girls Who Code calls for a “radical reinvention” of the American workplace in ways that would help mothers and other women.
Saujani writes that when she wrote Brave, Not Perfect (2019), she “was still in the throes of promoting the feminist propaganda of having it all via leaning in.” Her view changed during the pandemic—which exposed social and emotional fault lines in her life and others’ and which forced 12 million women from the labor force—and here, she adjusts her course. Expanding an essay for The Hill that called for a “Marshall Plan for Moms,” the author proposes a sweeping array of solutions in an uninspired book comprised of part rant, part self-help, and part “call to action” rooted in three “critical public policies”: affordable child care, paid parental leave, and cash payments to parents. Many ideas appear on bulleted lists called a “Playbook for Employers” and “What Women Can Do,” and while some are worthy, too many are overfamiliar, underdeveloped, or unimaginative. (Managers should “Lead by example,” and women should “Get enough sleep,” an idea that may seem ludicrously impractical to any mother of a 6-month-old.) The writing is merely serviceable, and many of Saujani’s ideas are surprisingly conservative or tame. She never suggests, for example, that working mothers might benefit from joining a labor union or pushing for a higher minimum wage. Worse, while Saujani pays lip service to second-wave feminists’ efforts, she slights them in subtle and seemingly ill-informed ways. For example, she writes that feminists “forgot” to work for “equality in the home via compensation for the unpaid labor we do.” In fact, they fought for it on many fronts, including, among numerous other examples, the Wages for Housework campaign. Saujani mentions her important work with Girls Who Code only briefly; a more enlightening book would have more deeply explored what that experience taught her.
A disappointing take on what America’s working women need.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982191-57-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
