Authoritative, illuminating and accessible.
This provocative study of minority-vote suppression successfully links blatant Reconstruction-era tactics and regulations with modern-day voting in America.
Activist Piven (Political Science and Sociology/CUNY; Challenging Authority, 2006, etc.), along with co-authors Minnite (Political Science/Barnard Coll.) and Groarke (Government/Manhattan Coll.), argues that decentralized electoral rules and regulations were originally designed to limit the African-American vote in the South, in response to the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which enfranchised all freed black men. Tactics employed in the 19th century included literacy tests, poll taxes, violence and intimidation; the ultimate discretion to disqualify voters was ceded to registrars. The authors note that the American personal-registration system puts the burden of registration on the voter rather than on the government, unlike many European democracies. The U.S. electoral system further allows certification to be periodic, permitting local election officials to sporadically purge voters. The book kicks into high gear when the authors describe, in riveting detail, the fevered techniques employed to suppress the black vote in important 1960s mayoral elections in Gary, Chicago and Cleveland, where the African-American electorate had surged due to migration. Qualified black voters were purged from registration rolls, ghost voters were added in white precincts and a campaign of disinformation prevailed, impeding new registrations of poor minorities. All three African-American candidates won anyway, but another goal was to mobilize the white vote by playing to racist fears using ugly stereotypes. The authors posit that these fears stem from demographic realities as America’s composition becomes more diverse, and that the Republican Party has become the champion for delaying the inevitable devolution of white power by focusing on close elections. The most compelling section is the informed analysis of how aggressive tactics, such as targeted misinformation campaigns and the challenging of black voters at polling places, were used to secure a Republican victory “by 537 votes” in the Florida 2000 election, where “nearly 180,000 ballots were cast but not counted…more than half of these by blacks, who make up only 12 percent of the state’s population.”
Authoritative, illuminating and accessible.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-354-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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