take my hand dolen perkins valdez reviews

Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Susanna Lea Assoc. The medical field’s unjust and exploitive treatment of Black people has been covered in the landmark nonfiction titles such as Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, and Perkins-Valdez skillfully adds to the literature with a nuanced story personalized by Civil’s desire for redemption over her role in the sterilizations. Dolen Perkins-Valdez has the enviable writing talents to draw the reader in to feel what her characters feel. I hope the Black History being taught now covers incidents in this book.

Meanwhile, the author movingly explores Civil’s passion for reproductive rights, shaped in part by her decision to abort a pregnancy with Tyrell. The History of the lack of justice for the poor, black children in this book broke my heart. A young, white civil rights lawyer shoulders the case, and the suit expands to include the federal government. As a result, Take My Hand is the kind of rare, elevating, illuminating, useful art that we would all do well to grasp for dear life. That is another way of saying that she crafts this book with great truth and wisdom. Civil is mortified and, with the aid of her best friend Tyrell Ralsey, whose parents are lawyers, sets in motion a lawsuit against the clinic. Perkins-Valdez relays untold pain honestly, astutely, but most of all, gently, like a sage would. Civil has reservations about giving the shots to her young patients, and her white supervisor later blindsides Civil by ordering the girls to be sterilized after their illiterate father approves the procedure. Civil Townsend lands her first nursing job after graduating from Tuskegee University at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, where she is instructed to administer the experimental Depo-Provera birth control shot to homebound sisters India and Erica Williams, ages 11 and 13, who live with their sharecropper father in a ramshackle, one-room house. Take My Hand Winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Fiction An Amazon Top 20 Book of the Year and Editors Choice Nominated for. Perkins-Valdez ( Balm) captivates with a scintillating story about Black women’s involuntary sterilizations in 1970s Montgomery, Ala.

Take my hand dolen perkins valdez reviews