Brash, blunt, unashamed, and justifiably filled with rage.
A collection of essays by the renowned, infamous French writer and filmmaker.
At her best, Despentes is vicious, iconoclastic, filthy-mouthed, and raw. She is all of those things in this out-of-print collection, first published in French in 2006. In a piece that describes the two years the author spent as a sex worker, she writes, “when we are told that prostitution is a ‘violent act against women,’ it is an attempt to make us forget that it is marriage that is a violent act against women, and all the general shit we have to put up with.” Elsewhere, she writes, “I speak as a woman who is always too much of everything she is: too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish, so they tell me.” Throughout, Despentes delivers deliciously nasty condemnations of misogyny, hypocrisy, all manner of sanctimonious nonsense. She draws from pop culture as well as sources as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Davis to make her case, which is unapologetically enraged. Toward the end of the book, she does get occasionally sloppy, contradicting her own points and resting a little too easily on crowd pleasers: “What is difficult to deal with, even today, is being a woman,” she writes near the end. At times, the momentum of the rant overwhelms the logic of the argument. Still, there is unquestionable bliss to be found in the author’s looseness of style and no-bullshit approach. “In my case,” she writes, “prostitution was a crucial step in my reconstruction after I was raped. A compensation settlement in thousand-franc installments for what had been brutally taken from me. What I could sell of myself to each client was a part of me that had remained intact.” Despentes has always been one of a kind, and her willingness to break apart all kinds of received wisdom remains vital.
Brash, blunt, unashamed, and justifiably filled with rage.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-53929-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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
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