The Daughters of Kobani

The Book of the Week is “The Daughters of Kobani, The Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice” by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, published in 2021.

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

“She didn’t have time to offer hourly updates to her family, who were tracking every moment of the battle for Kobani on Facebook and WhatsApp.”

No, the above referred NOT to an American political campaign, but a real-life war.

Violence in northern Syria resumed between Kurds (an oppressed minority in Iraq and Syria) and non-Kurds in March 2004 after tensions boiled over at a soccer game. At the same time, there was hostility over water-rights of the Euphrates river between Syria (a non-NATO member) and Turkey (a NATO member).

Turkey harbored anger and resentment toward Syria’s leader, and wanted him out. The Soviets backed Syria’s leader, as did the U.S. initially. In the 1990’s, a Marxist-Leninist activist named Abdullah Ocalan formed a violent (some might say terrorist) pro-Kurdish, pro-gender-equality group called PKK, that agitated for self-rule for the Kurds in Syria.

The decades-long cliche is: the latest terror group (ISIS) obtained modern war weaponry from Iraqi forces, who had received the equipment from America. As is well known, the region has been a foreign-policy conundrum for the governments of industrialized countries (with their strategic interests), for forever. The U.S. thought it needed to fight ISIS, but didn’t want to send in ground troops (and invite yet another “Vietnam” in the Middle East). But it did want to protect its physical diplomatic and military presence in northern Iraq– Kurdish territory, near the Syrian border. So it sent some in, anyway.

The author described a handful of females who volunteered to join one of PKK’s spinoff militias (YPK and YPG). From the city of Kobani in Syria, the females were resistant to their arranged marriages and limited educations decided on by their families’ patriarchs. Two of the females commanding troops engaged in guerrilla warfare that resembled “capture the flag” or paintball, but with real war weapons, real deaths and really widespread destruction of civilians’ communities.

During the early 2010’s, the U.S. decided to let the Kurdish militias on the ground do the most dangerous fighting. The YPG had communications devices of radios, cell phones and walkie-talkies, and U.S.-supplied guns. ISIS had rifles, rocket launchers, artillery, car bombs, snipers, IEDs, land mines and suicide bombers. In summer 2014, the U.S. launched tens of airstrikes on ISIS in and around Kobani.

Read the book to learn: the fate of the fight’s many stakeholders that included countries, groups and individuals, how ruling authorities furthered gender-equality for Tunisians and Syrian Kurds in 2014 and 2016 respectively, and much more about the tentative progress made by various parties.

The Making of A Woman Surgeon

The Book of the Week is “The Making of A Woman Surgeon” by Elizabeth Morgan, M.D., published in 1980. Her story told how times have changed.

“Female applicants [to Harvard Medical School in 1966] were regarded as either abnormal or silly.” So the author ended up attending Yale Medical School, where there were only seven females in a class of 97 students.

A sterile floor-length gown was required to be worn over one’s street clothes when one entered the surgical intensive care unit. It was a joke because it didn’t prevent infection. Another joke was that the water used by medical personnel in scrubbing up, wasn’t sterile. Besides, their arms’ hair follicles contained bacteria that rose to the surface of the scrub.

In 1972, after surviving all the sexism in addition to the abusive, hierarchical training system to that point, Morgan worked in a veterans hospital, serving the Vietnam war-wounded. She wrote about the tenor of the times, “These were federally subsidized cigarettes sold at cut-rate prices, tax-free, in unlimited quantities to all V.A. patients.”

In May 1973, the author began writing a medical column for Cosmopolitan magazine. The monthly snippet was only 150 to 200 words, but she spent eight to ten hours writing every single one after fact-gathering from a minimum of five sources, and fact-checking, in the library. Then an editor would clarify her facts, if necessary.

Unfortunately, human nature doesn’t change. In the mid-1970’s, Morgan worked alongside a surgeon who made about a million dollars a year performing unnecessary surgeries. His strong suit was that he could boast that no patient ever sued him. Since his patients were in relatively good health prior to surgery, they recovered uneventfully. Clearly, patients who need surgery, are much more likely to have complications afterward, and are much more likely to have worse outcomes. Problems can crop up that are not the surgeon’s fault.

The author specialized in plastic surgery, which includes reconstructive and cosmetic. She preferred to do the former, to help women feel better about themselves, many of whom had had breast-cancer surgery. When she struck out on her own in private practice, there were lots of patients to choose from.

For, there were still plenty of overzealous male breast-cancer surgeons who truly believed that performing aggressive mastectomies was going to cure their patients. Many of those women were traumatized by the assault on their femininity. And they eventually died, anyway.

Read the book to learn of the various personalities of doctors and patients Morgan encountered during her medical training, and the nature of the training in her specialty in her generation.

Almost Golden – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Almost Golden, Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News” by Gwenda Blair, published in 1988.

Born in February 1947 in a Philadelphia suburb, Savitch began her broadcasting career in her teenage years. Her high school boyfriend helped get her a job at a small radio station in the Atlantic City area.

Savitch attended upstate New York’s Ithaca college, which had an extensive communications department that taught students how to be producers and cinematographers, as even news-broadcasting was becoming a show-business process. Television was the visual medium at the height of its popularity, that cranked out image-making content– with quantity over quality.

The mentality of the male administrators and students who were affiliated with the school radio station, was that females should not go on the air. Savitch aggressively lobbied against the males’ sexism, but she was still given low-level, off-hours assignments, as competition was fierce.

As a student, Savitch did all sorts of broadcasting and modeling gigs, as she was good-looking and videogenic. By autumn 1968, she had become an anchorwoman at a local (rather than network) TV station in Houston.

Starting in 1971, female employees began to agitate against gender discrimination at NBC. The network tried to appease them by giving them fancier titles but gave them neither higher-level work nor raised their salaries to those of males in equivalent positions. Finally, in 1977, female plaintiffs won a lawsuit that compensated them monetarily, but could never make them whole psychologically.

Meanwhile in 1973, Savitch was covering the human interest element in TV-news stories about females, such as natural childbirth and rape. At the time, those were touchy subjects for television, so they had yet to make the talk-show circuits.

Part of the reason Savitch’s career stalled in the early 1980’s, was that she was acting like a prima donna, insisting that her employer provide her with an entourage: a hairdresser, makeup artist, wardrobe and security guard. Another was that her beauty and great composure on-screen went only so far. She lacked strong intellectual story-gathering and writing skills.

The author inexplicably quoted individuals she interviewed as saying that Savitch’s years-long cocaine use couldn’t (!?) be detected in her appearance or behavior up until a specific incident that occurred in autumn of 1983.

Perhaps the author didn’t want to denigrate members of the entertainment industry by writing that even into the 1980’s, alcohol and drug use was rampant. It was still the elephant in the room until various people and entities (Betty Ford, MADD and talk shows, among others) forced cultural changes for the better, in American society.

Anyway, read the book to learn of many other aspects of Savitch’s lifestyle and personality that led to her fate.