Half the Sky is either one of the most important books I have ever reviewed, or it is reportage about a will-o'-the-wisp movement destined to end up in the footnotes of history ... This book isn't a sermon, and neither is this review. These Pulitzer Prize-winning authors see the treatment of women in developing countries as the great story of this century, a moral issue, sure, but also as an economic one ...authors handle this grim material by telling us just a handful of horrible stories at a time, based on their own extensive interviews ... These stories are electrifying and have the effect of breaking down this enormous problem into segments the reader can focus on. Suddenly, these horrendous problems begin to seem solvable ...a call to arms, a call for help, a call for contributions, but also a call for volunteers.
In their urgent new book, the husband and wife team of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn argue passionately that the oppression of women and girls worldwide is 'one of the paramount human rights problems of this century' ... Serious abuses include female genital mutilation, honor killings, sexual slavery, and mass rape, but this book is far more than a catalog of horrors. The authors include numerous steps that can be taken to reduce the awful suffering ... authors are careful not to blame men alone. Oppression of women often is deeply embedded in local cultures, and is accepted by men and women alike ...excels as a compelling mix of history, culture, politics, and religious practice... a grab-the-reader-by-the-lapels wake-up call.
...Half the Sky introduces us to some of the most courageous and inspiring girls and women on the planet ... the journalists deftly weave relevant stats and political context throughout ... Women need protective laws, of course, and the right to hold property and bank accounts, but the authors write, 'Westerners invest too much effort in changing unjust laws and not enough in changing culture, by building schools or assisting grassroots movements' ...book is written mostly in the affable voice of Kristof... Intellectual credentials and a down-to-earth tone let them cross politically incorrect boundaries ... will ignite a grass-roots revolution like the one that eliminated slavery.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his Chinese-American wife, Sheryl WuDunn, have written an impassioned exposé of this subjugation — and a roadmap to equality ...a humbling story in a book full of humbling stories ...Kristof and WuDunn's book is empowering for the reader. It shows that, while there is a mountain of misogyny to be climbed, it is being ascended, woman by woman, day by day ... a book that comes close to being a masterpiece of modern journalism, it's sad—and a little squalid—that Kristof has allowed a discredited cause from his columns to crawl into its pages.
...the authors — whose masterful storytelling and spot-on reportage first framed many Americans' perception of the Tiananmen Square massacre — would celebrate the sugar-from-pills story because it hammers home what otherwise would be an esoteric point in the most personal of ways: from the perspective of a singular woman ... Half the Sky may very well be the literary equivalent of Mahatma Gandhi's 1930 Salt Satyagraha or Martin Luther King Jr.'s, 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Marches, wherein peaceful means spotlighted, then helped shatter, an injustice historically tolerated ...deftly braid together the slippery strands of empirical evidence, research data and individual narratives to implicate gender inequality and the larger horror of grave indifference to women's human rights... Kristof and WuDunn beg you to do your part and, hearteningly, cite solutions — some remarkably simple, remarkably cheap — for every crisis they elucidate.
Nothing in Half the Sky: How to Change the World is new or news, although it is sometimes made to appear so ... The authors describe brutality towards women as 'a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century' ... In contemplating these horrors Kristof and WuDunn sometimes become downright owlish in their capacity for incomprehension ...authors have no critique of globalism to offer, nor do they appear to grasp how western economic power keeps the developing world too poor to develop ... Anyone who has endured the talkfests of the UN for decade after weary decade, and seen massive aid projects miss their mark and collapse in a welter of bad faith, will echo the authors' certainty that it is now down to ordinary people to do practical things for other ordinary people.
