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Judith Butler
Mixed The Atlantic Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom. This is nothing new, although being reminded of it is good. But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims? ... It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part ... Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity?
Blake Bailey
Pan The Nation ... readers should have the chance to buy the book and come to their own conclusions. It’s not a great book—sorry, Cynthia Ozick—but it’s fluently written and contains a huge amount of information. Still, the whole episode leaves me depressed and discouraged. Maybe there really are two literary worlds. There’s the public one of book talks, dinners, parties, prizes, events, in which most men are reasonably polite and respectful to women. And there’s the secret one, in which men, #notallmen but lots of them, do pretty much whatever they want to and with women, and defend each other whenever women protest.
Alma Guillermoprieto, trans. by Esther Allen
Positive The New York Times Eventually, these conflicts, piled on top of loneliness, youthful angst and assorted man troubles, lead young Alma to the edge of a nervous breakdown ... Dancing With Cuba is a pleasure to read, full of humanity, sly humor, curiosity and knowledge ... She uses dance as a lens through which to explore the aspirations and injustices and contradictions of a whole society. It\'s a fresh and lively perspective ... Guillermoprieto explains that she has improvised a bit -- her students are composites, dialogue is invented, her letters are reconstructed -- yet, she writes, the result is not fiction, but \'a faithful transcription\' of her memories, including the partial, hazy, revised ones, and the ones \'completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were.\'
Cecile Richards
Positive The New York Times Book Review Books by public figures, especially when written with help from others — Lauren Peterson is a speechwriter — are often pretty deadly, but Make Trouble manages to be genial, engaging and humorous ... Her portrait of Nancy Pelosi as a nice person, a thoughtful boss and a brilliant strategist largely responsible for the passage of the Affordable Care Act (without the Stupak amendment that would have banned insurance coverage for abortion) is a pleasant corrective to the increasingly common view of her as an incompetent witch ... battles are something I wish Richards had gone into more deeply. Although she opens with her appearance before the congressional committee investigating Planned Parenthood for profiting from fetal remains — the same committee that investigated Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, with as little to show for it — her take is basically upbeat ... if you’re looking for books to fill you with energy for the long haul that lies before us, this one is a great place to start.
Matthew Desmond
Rave The Guardian By examining one city through the microscopic lens of housing...[Desmond] shows us how the system that produces that pain and poverty was created and is maintained. I can’t remember when an ethnographic study so deepened my understanding of American life.