Customer Reviews

The Other Half of Gender: Men's Issues in Development

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This is the first review I write, but the previous review (and score) was so ridiculous that I felt the need to try to briefly compensate for it. This is a very interesting book, drawing on good scholarship, and asking provocative questions. When I read some chapters first, soon after this book came out, it felt like it allowed me to understand some of the "black boxes" that exist when talking about life in many poor countries. What I mean is this: much of our knowledge is at the structural, macro-social level--questions of income, growth rates, environmental change, political governance, etc. We try to understand how these factors influence people to behave--to produce, to innovate, to fight, to make peace. But there remains always some degree of black box at the core of it all--what makes people tick? How do they make concrete choices (after all, they do not all make the same choices)? This book provide me with great and stimulating insights into that black box.

I especially remember the Barker and Ricardo article (a famous and oft quoted one) and the Correia and Bannon concluding article (a stimulating research agenda). I highly recommend them. Now, 4 years later, I am not so sure I found many answers here--but I sure was stimulated to ask better questions, and I am now more aware of dimensions I neglected before. What more can one ask of a book?

I have no idea what the ideological agenda of the previous reviewer was (the word "review" being an overstatement in any case) but I highly recommend looking beyond it.

The product description says the book "is an attempt to bring the gender and development debate full circle." The goal however is the core Orwellian feminist dream - controlling men, redefining their roles etc. Must be a very small circle.