Michelle Goldberg reviews Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
Reading
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Reading Nicholas Kristof‘s New York Times column is rarely fun. Week after week, he tries to humanize the world’s most pressing problems through intrepid, immersive reporting, struggling to make his audience care the way he cares. Like his colleague Bob Herbert, he is relentlessly earnest — both men insist on discussing things many would rather not hear about, and they are averse to glib contrarianism and snark. Kristof’s moral urgency can seem hectoring, though that’s not really his fault. It’s an almost impossible task to channel outrage so consistently without leaving readers overwhelmed and tempted to tune out.
That’s one reason why Half the Sky, written by Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is particularly impressive. The book presents a catalogue of horrors, including sex slavery, obstetric fistula, female genital mutilation, gang rape, honor killing, and AIDS. The authors are clear-eyed about the difficulties facing those trying to make change, the failures of foreign aid, and the occasionally terrible unintended consequences of foreign interventions. Yet Half the Sky manages to be inspiring and engrossing rather than numbing.