Multifaceted discussions regarding the challenges faced by African-Americans during the Obama presidency.
Anthology of interviews with notable black scholars, focused on the prospects for social justice in the age of Obama.
The book is a companion volume to the Pacifica Radio Archives, which has long documented “voices from the black freedom movement.” Journalist Griffith, who has been researching and presenting this material on BBC since 2007, describes the archive as containing “stories of African American struggle and triumph…for those who wish to listen and learn from the people who defined a movement,” including Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. Here she presents seven interviews with community organizers, legal scholars, academics and activists, attempting to capture a moment in which Obama’s presidency arguably obscures ongoing racial inequities, exacerbated by a weak economy and continued discrimination by law enforcement. Griffith provides historical context in her conversation with Dr. Vincent Harding, a theologian best known for co-authoring Dr. King’s famous antiwar speech of 1967; Harding observes that the civil-rights movement was more accurately concerned with “the expansion and deepening of democracy in America.” Legal scholar Michelle Alexander offers disturbing thoughts regarding policies of mass incarceration and the “War on Drugs” that visit disproportionate (and hypocritical) harm on black communities. Dr. Julianne Malveaux probes the racial aspects of the ongoing recession, grimly noting that “[Obama’s] employment legislation is just pathetic, frankly…they tiptoed around issues of black unemployment.” Ramona Africa, one of two survivors of the notorious 1985 bombing of the radical MOVE compound in Philadelphia, provides a unique perspective on police brutality toward African-Americans. Other notable participants include Temple University journalism professor Linn Washington Jr. and one-time Obama appointee Van Jones. Griffith concludes by wondering if progressives have been “lulled into a satisfied slumber” by Obama’s election, and whether Dr. King’s ambitions have been betrayed by this complacency.
Multifaceted discussions regarding the challenges faced by African-Americans during the Obama presidency.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-87286-546-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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