A provocative book that asks important questions but relies on dubious data analysis.
An unusual, intriguing analysis of men’s opinions about women.
This genre-bending book expounds on two uncited surveys about gender roles featuring predominantly white, college-educated, and religious people. Biblical and historical examinations of gender roles, plus fictional dialogues among three 40-something male friends, supplement the survey responses. The opening chapter explores the profound influence mothers have on men. Camillo shares stories of powerful women throughout history and documents how gender equality has shifted from hunter-gatherer times to the modern day. The Old Testament’s Song of Solomon and the love story of Rachel and Jacob serve as aspirational models of romance. Camillo offers a retrospective of how standards of female sexiness have changed, from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy to Cindy Crawford. A majority of male survey respondents reported that smart women turned them on and that they would be comfortable with a woman financially supporting or outearning them. They also resoundingly agreed that platonic friendships with women were possible and that they would feel comfortable with female health care providers. Despite ample evidence that women do the lion’s share of housework and childrearing, 60% of men surveyed said it was not primarily women’s responsibility to attend to those duties. The last chapter considers societal interpretations of sexual harassment and assault throughout history, including the #MeToo movement, which most male survey respondents said had not changed men’s behavior. In this refreshing, conversation-starting book, Camillo effectively incorporates diverse perspectives on gender socialization. Many survey responses are progressive (84% of men are comfortable with female physicians, for example). However, the book’s foundational data is flimsy and, at times, erroneously interpreted. Though women were asked to guess men’s responses, Camillo occasionally states the results as if the women were speaking for themselves. Ultimately, the book notes but doesn’t interrogate toxic gender stereotypes in summaries like “Our survey indicates that a woman can have a lousy personality, no sense of humor, and not give a damn about the man she’s trying to attract, yet she can still be sexy in a man’s eyes.” Still, while the surveys are imperfect, the results point to the acceptance of gender equality among respondents.
A provocative book that asks important questions but relies on dubious data analysis.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9798888247020
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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