Half the Sky (nonfiction)

Title: Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide

Authors: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Don’t laugh, but I heard about this book through my mom. Who heard about it through Oprah’s Book Club. Yeah.

I ended up watching the Oprah episode that featured Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, and their story stuck with me. However, that wasn’t enough to motivate me to buy the book. Then, rather ironically, the book ended up on www.feministing.com’s website under their series of blog posts usually accurately entitled ‘Not Oprah’s Book Club.’ I think this title is supposed to make their books sound kind of hardcore, feministic, and in-your-face. Oprah’s actual book club, on the other hand, is for the bored housewives of suburbia.

I’m telling you all of this because it sums up the book pretty well: It’s for hardcore, in-your-face feminists and bored suburban people alike.

While there were parts that---so bluntly descriptive and upsetting---I had to skip, I forced myself to finish such a great read. It brought the massive problem of worldwide, systematic female oppression and flashed it in the eyes of the public, simplifying such a major issue until it was stripped down to it’s bare, saddening core.

Despite this, it was such an uplifting book. The last chapter, just to add, let’s the reader know what they can do to help end worldwide oppression.

If you’re interested in contemporary world issues, helping people, or feminism, check it out. And if you’re not, then you ought to look into it anyway. Before this I never truly realized---despite seeing it on the news on a regular basis---how dreadful parts of the world still are. Half the Sky is Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s excellent approach to fixing a problem everyone needs to know about.


EDIT: Just found this and felt the need to add it. It doesn't have to do with Half the Sky, but it's about sex slavery in the US: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfb1NbCT8Ik&feature=sub