by David Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2004
Social analysis with verve and insight.
A perceptive and original take on the causes and consequences of South Africa’s current crime wave.
In the decade since South Africa became a multiracial democracy, crime, as British and South African journalist Cohen (Chasing the Red, White, and Blue, 2001, etc.) notes in this informative account, has risen “169 percent, housebreaking by 33 percent, cash heists, as well as carjacking, by 30 percent . . . [and] 71 percent of companies report being the victims of fraud in the last two years, compared to 51 percent of business in the rest of Africa, and just 37 percent worldwide.” Crime affects black and white, rich and poor, and is perpetrated by blacks and whites desperate for money as well as those who have no apparent need. It is also the biggest cause of brain drain and sluggish foreign investment. Cohen attempts to show how crime has become a way of life, with far-reaching effects on a society still coping with the legacy of apartheid. The author illustrates the problem with the experience of the family-owned Jules Furniture Store in downtown Johannesburg. Jack Rubin and Harry Sher, the resilient sons of Jewish immigrants, transformed the original bicycle store into a chain that sells low-end furniture and appliances. Their stores, despite expensive security measures, are consistently robbed. Specially modified cars break through the security grilles, then barrel through the shop windows, their drivers making off with what they can before the police arrive. They also experience internal stealing, at the hands of Harry’s brother and another employee. The firm hired to transport the money to the bank steals from them, and they must repossess more furniture as customers fail to pay. Weaving the story of the owners, Jules Street itself, the trial of the two thieves, and the current repossessors, two former carjackers who have gone straight, Cohen draws a vivid portrait of a society struggling to emerge from years of sanctioned violence and corruption.
Social analysis with verve and insight.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28869-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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 Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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