'Half the Sky' is a superb book about the horrors and hopes of oppressed women in Third World nations

NONFICTION

Half the Sky

By Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn.

Knopf, 294 pp., $27.95.

This is not bedtime reading.

No, this superb book will not put you to sleep, but it may haunt your dreams. It is grim and graphic in its detail about Third World brothels, sex trafficking, genital cutting, honor killings, indifference to women in childbirth and routine, workaday rape.

It is also personal. Real women, mostly under 20, with names you may be unable to pronounce, endure lives unimaginable to most of us.

That "Half the Sky" is so personal heightens its power and persuasiveness. It may change the way you view the world's voiceless women, in their oppression and their promise.

As Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" once catalyzed us to save our birds and better steward our earth, "Half the Sky" stands to become a classic, spurring us to spare impoverished women these terrors, and elevate them to turn around the future of their nations.

"Women and girls cloistered in huts, uneducated, unemployed, and unable to contribute significantly to the world represent a vast seam of human gold that is never mined," write the authors, a married couple, who together won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising in China.

But that's only the economic argument to protect and nurture women. The other one is moral. "The brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world [is] a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century," they write.

I cannot believe any is more compelling.

Meet Mahabouba Muhammad, sold in Ethiopia for $10 at age 13 to a 60-year-old man who took her as his second wife, alternately raping and beating her. Pregnant, she ran away, and went into labor, alone, for seven agonized days. The baby's death inside her left her incontinent in every way -- the result of a fistula, a common outcome in the world of brutal rapes (think sticks) or obstructed labor without medical intervention. The authors call these injuries "a cruelty of indifference."...