Two publishing houses were kind enough to send me these books, and now it’s review time. I had a good time reading both of them, though they were quite different. The Abortionist’s Daughter is a murder mystery, and not the kind of book that I would usually pick up. Paradigm Found: Leading and Managing for Positive Change is part biography of the founding of The Global Fund for Women, and part how-to manual about starting your own non-profit. Reviews below the fold.
The Abortionist’s Daughter by Elisabeth Hyde
First, full disclosure: The publishing house for this book bought ad space on Feministe, and advertised this novel here. But since I personally don’t receive any of our advertising money, I think I can still review this book fairly.
The premise is this: Diana Duprey, an abortion provider in Colorado, is found dead in her pool. She’s been murdered, and suspects range from her husband to the leader of a local pro-life group. The book focuses on her college-aged daughter, who had a rocky relationship with her mother.
I was a little worried going into this book, because I’m not a big fan of murder mysteries or thrillers (I read a lot of R.L. Stein and Christopher Pike as a kid, but got over it by 7th grade or so). The last dectective novel I read was three years ago, and it was required for a class. So The Abortionist’s Daughter is a detour from what I usually pick up at the bookstore, and I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it — it would be hokey and predictable, the characters would be flat, etc.
But I was wrong. I liked it quite a bit. It was well-written, exciting, and the plot was interesting and multi-dimensional. The book gets into abortion politics a bit, but doesn’t come down with easy answers on either side. And it’s engaging — I read the whole thing, cover to cover, in one evening.
Naturally, there were things I didn’t love about it. I couldn’t really connect with any of the characters, and found that I didn’t really like any of them, or feel sympathetic at all. But then, I’m a reader who loves characters, and who tends to be more interested in their development than in the plot of the book. But if you, like most people, are more interested in what happens than in who things happen to, you’ll enjoy this book. It has plot twists and interesting dynamics, but it doesn’t try and pull any “Gotcha!” tricks on the reader, either.
My verdict: A solid beach read.
Paradigm Found: Leading and Managing for Positive Change by Anne Firth Murray
Anne Firth Murray was one of the founding members of The Global Fund for Women, and in this book she offers her ideas and guidelines for how to start and maintain a successful nonprofit, and generally how to be a positive force in the world. I really enjoyed this book — Murray strikes an appropriate balance between her personal experience, general progressive ideals, and concrete suggestions for how to succeed as an actor for change. I found myself underlining and highlighting as I read, eager to remember her bits of wisdom and advice.
She begins the book by tackling dualistic ideas about politics, activism and life in general, and suggests that we shift our paradigm:
Limiting some of us from moving forward is the way in which we view each other socially. The current paradigm, a hierarchical pattern of relating, leads us to feel separated from one another, leaving some people disempowered and others filled with arrogance. Our societies are based for the most part on the idea that things can be explained in either/or and win/lose terms, so we constantly judge each person or way of doing things as better or worse than others rather than as just different from them. Such hierarchical thinking has resulted in the idea that some country or some person is “number one” or at the “top.” And it can lead to the absolutist view that “you are either with us or against us!” In reality, life is much more complicated than that. In truth, each of us is one among many. The trick is to organize social relationships in such a way that we all gain rather than some losing in order for others to “win.” This paradigm shift — moving from an either/or to both/and and from win/lose to win/win — stems from holding certain views about the world. And not everyone shares those views.
Many people are convinced, for example, that “there will always be poor people.” Many people think that violence is inevitable. And many are convinced that command and control organizational forms are natural. As long as we are living in a world where the typical patter of soaicl relations is such that one group considers itself or is considered better or more important than another (white vs. black, male vs. female, rich vs. poor, edcated vs. illiterate, gay vs. straight, young vs. old), many people will feel dismpowered and thus impotent to solve the problems that face us.
This hierarchical or patriarchal system of dominance and submission is impractical and wasteful. It does not allow for the valuable contributions of people who have been marginalized, and it shuts off true learning among people who are different from one another.
A woman after my own heart.
She further discusses her reasons for focusing specifically on women and development:
At this point in human history, according to United Nations sources, there is no major field of activity, whether it be the economy, education, health, or government, and no country in which women have equality with men.
Women worldwide do almost all of the world’s domestic work, and yet we seldom receive income for the time and effort this work entails. Women provide more health care than all the organized health services put together, and yet many women lack equal access to health care for themselves. Women grow more than half of the world’s food, yet we own only 1 percent of the world’s land. Women make up one-third of the world’s paid labor force, yet we are concentrated in the lawest-paid occupations. Women comprise more than 50 percent of the world’s population, and yet we are discriminated against in terms of education; there are eighty million more boys than girls enrolled in primary and secondary schools. Women comprise 50 percent of the world’s enfranchised population, an dyet we hold no more than 10 percent of the seats in national legislatures.
Is there a better agument for being a feminist and a supporter of women’s rights everywhere?
Her book is organized according to the basic steps of starting an organization, and is peppered with her own experiences at the Global Fund and her general ideas about progressive organizing. You learn the basics, and you learn the theory behind it — and the Global Fund is structured in a way that embraces difference, diminishes hierarchy and promotes grassroots activism.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Fund is its trust in women. They apply for grants, and as long as they meet a series of requirements, they get them — regardless of whether their grant is for community-building or family planning or education. They don’t have to fit into any narrow mission. The Global Fund trusts women around the world to know what they need in their own communities. That makes it quite different from most other international development organizations, which often attempt to push their own agendas on the people they try to help. And Paradigm Found provides quite a bit of insight into this fantastic organization.
My verdict: Worth the read.
I also just finished On Beauty by Zadie Smith (very good) and In Search of Islamic Feminism by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. At some point, I’ll try and unpack the second book a bit — there’s a lot to it, and it was written 10 years ago, so it’s interesting to see how things have (and haven’t) changed in the past decade. But if you’re looking for a good non-fiction read about international women’s rights, I’d recommend it.