Vivid portrayals of lives disrupted and freedom denied.
The human consequences of the Dobbs decision.
Health care reporter Luthra makes her book debut with an intense look at the lives of patients and providers after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She takes her title from the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court held that states could limit access to abortion, as long as the limitation did not impose what the Court called “an undue burden,” a phrase that they left undefined. As Luthra traveled throughout the country, she found frustration and anguish in states where women had no or limited access to abortion. In Texas, which enacted a six-week ban on abortions even before the Supreme Court’s decision, 16-year-old Tiffany was trapped in a system that she felt powerless to negotiate, lacking resources to find help or leave Houston. Kaleigh, 29, drove 500 miles, with her boyfriend, from Dallas to a clinic in New Mexico, the nearest she could find, where she was given mifepristone and misoprostol; her abortion cost her $700. In Florida, which had a 15-week ban, the author met Jasper, a transgender man who did not realize he was pregnant until it was almost too late to get an abortion in his state. In Oklahoma, which had only four clinics in the entire state that provided abortions, and which, like Texas, soon copied a six-week ban, Luthra met providers overwhelmed with demand. Patients and providers revealed the fear, anger, and betrayal they felt as laws changed. One woman in Kansas had an abortion scheduled for just two days after a critical vote affirmed access. The author underscores the way the Dobbs decision has exacerbated inequality, victimizing Black and Latine women who cannot afford to travel to New Mexico, Illinois, California, and Colorado, where abortion is legal.
Vivid portrayals of lives disrupted and freedom denied.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550086
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
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