by Cornel West with Christa Buschendorf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2014
Lively, heated, fighting words—self-serious but never dull.
Keeping the social conscience burning through six different models of African-American leadership.
Spurred by the election of the first black president and the subsequent eruption of the Occupy Wall Street movement, accomplished, outspoken African-American scholar West (Pro+Agonist: The Art of Opposition, 2012, etc.) and fellow academic Buschendorf held several conversations between the summer of 2009 and January 2013 about the ongoing relevance of historic black figures. Moving from Frederick Douglass back to Ida B. Wells, the authors treat the towering and often uneven legacy of leaders who spoke out against injustice and even, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, died for their beliefs. West has long advocated for the importance of the “organic intellectual,” one not afraid to come down from the ivory tower and mess with “grass-roots folk,” and he admires in these six figures their relentless truth-speaking and ability to inspire others to action. Indeed, Malcolm X’s parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” in expressing black rage is West’s ideal. Similarly, he admires a critic such as Wells, born a slave, who exposed in her investigative newspaper reporting the lynching going on in the South in the 1880s when others wouldn’t touch the subject; or the galvanizing grass-roots leadership of Ella Baker, who resisted the charismatic style of King in favor of hands-on mobilizing and teaching and thus was a catalytic model for the Occupy movement. West bemoans the “deodoriz[ing]” of these radical figures—e.g., shying away from W.E.B. Du Bois’ communist sympathies and the turn toward complicity with the white mainstream. The concluding section, “Last Words on the Black Prophetic Tradition in the Age of Obama,” however, is lacking, as West aims his vitriol against the “cowardly capitulation of Black leadership to Obama’s neoliberal policies,” without a chance for vigorous rebuttal.
Lively, heated, fighting words—self-serious but never dull.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0352-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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