An empowering story coupled with easy-to-navigate steps that can help any woman achieve her full potential.
An African woman buries her written dreams in the dirt and makes them come true.
Trent, known as Oprah Winfrey's "all-time favorite guest," grew up poor in a small cattle-herding village in Zimbabwe. Married by 14 and a mother of three by 18, the author had little to look forward to other than a life of sexual, physical, and verbal abuse, grueling work, and more children. But when an American woman came to her village and dared to ask Trent about her dreams, this set in motion a series of steps that led Trent to bury her written dreams in the dirt near her home. By rooting her intentions firmly in the ground, she was able to work toward her goals and eventually got to the United States, where she earned a college degree, master’s degree, and a doctorate. With help from Winfrey, Trent fulfilled the final step of her dream: building a school in her village in Africa so that young girls could receive an education. The author intertwines her personal memoir of life in Africa with stories from her grandmothers, snippets of African history, and insights into the culture, and she then adds practical steps women can take to fulfill their own dreams. If a woman identifies and writes down what she truly hungers for, confronts her fears, visualizes her future unfolding as she plans each step, and gains the support of other women as she embarks on her journey, anything is possible. Trent's energy and conviction are evident throughout the book, and her story is invigorating, revitalizing, motivating, and encouraging. Although many women will never face the hardships Trent did, others will find her story highly resonant and be able to use her methodology to work toward their own goals.
An empowering story coupled with easy-to-navigate steps that can help any woman achieve her full potential.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4566-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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