Half the Sky
By Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Knopf September 2009
258 pages
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl DuWunn are Pulitzer-prize
winning journalists who work for the New York Times. They are also husband and
wife. The year after they reported on the hundreds of lives claimed at
Tiananmen Square, they discovered that 36,000 baby girls die each year in China
because their parents do not give them the same level of care they extend to
their brothers. They realized that the horrors inflicted on women in countries
such as China, India, Pakistan and the Congo rarely get any media coverage.
They set out to change that.
In Half the Sky,
the authors address the issues that women in many countries are dealing with
today, such as sex trafficking, maternal mortality, wife beating, bride burning
and rape. Each chapter introduces us to a woman that Kristof and DuWunn have
worked with personally. Their stories are heartbreaking. The fact that we haven’t
heard them before is an outrage.
The authors posit that these are more than ‘women’s
issues,’ as they are so ignorantly referred to by many politicians. Instead these
are transformative issues that, with proper attention, can transform countries.
“Think about the major issues confronting us in this century. These include
war, insecurity, and terrorism; population pressures, environmental strains,
and climate change; poverty and income gaps. For all these diverse problems,
empowering women is part of the answer.”
One thing that I appreciated about this book was the
honesty of its authors. They admit that nonprofit organizations tend to play up
their successes and downplay their failures. They want to keep
working in their fields and if they are discredited and lose funding, then they can’t
assist the people they want to help. The authors even admit their own faults,
when they crossed the line from journalists to saviors and the times when their
efforts were not successful.
I listened to the first half of this book on audiobook, narrated
by Cassandra Campbell, and read the remainder because I had to return the
audiobook. I really appreciated Ms. Campbell’s narration. With stories as
painful as this, it would be easy to read with sorrow and hopelessness in your
voice. Instead, the narration is poised and factual without losing a very real
sense of compassion and empathy. When I
was reading the ending, I missed the narration. The stories that I heard from
Ms. Campbell’s excellent narration are the ones that stay with me.
This is not a cheerful book. However, it is one with
hope. The authors provide an appendix with so many ways for the reader to get
involved. Although this is not a
happy book, it is an incredibly important one. If you are going to read one
non-fiction book, choose this one. It will open your eyes to the incredible
cruelties and disadvantages that women are still dealing with in the
twenty-first century and make you completely reevaluate the way you see power,
safety, and the world.
A note, my friends o' the blog: I am taking a little time off to enjoy the Christmas joy. I will be back one week from Monday, otherwise known as January 2nd. I hope each of you have a wonderful, amazing, stupendous, fantastic Christmas and New Year's filled with happiness, family, and lots of cookies!
PS - Enter the giveaway right here! I will send you, yes you, a book! (Well,,,,if you win. But the rest of you can say, "I entered the very first giveaway on Literary Lindsey and it was awesome. Maybe you should all make T-shirts...)
