Over a period of the five years, beginning in 2014, the City of Detroit cut of water services for over a quarter million residents. This book, writes reviewer Compton, is a "dense, deeply researched history of Detroit’s water disasters."
The review slams four female writers for misdiagnosing the alienation attendant to contemporary women's roles by urging changes in behavior without analyzing the work/household dynamic and persistent gender inequality, preferring either a retreat into so-called womanly roles or encouraging masculine-style individualism. They ignore redefining attitudes toward care and care workers, and securing for them social recognition and material support.
The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.
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