by Randall Kennedy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2008
A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.
A scholarly yet accessible examination of racial loyalty and betrayal in the African-American community from a distinguished legal historian.
Kennedy (Harvard Law School; Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, 2003, etc.) opens this energetic volume with a probing analysis of the ways in which Senator Barack Obama has been challenged to prove his blackness as he campaigns for the presidency. The son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, Obama, the author notes, has received a cool reception from black cultural gatekeepers who question his race credentials because he grew up in Hawaii and is not, in their view, a bona fide soul brother. Kennedy also cites Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Vernon Jordan as figures whose political and economic clout has rendered them suspect among the blacks and earned them the damning epithet “sellout.” The author traces concerns about race betrayal to slavery, when slaves helped thwart rebellions by alerting white plantation owners. He details the infamous case of South Carolina slave Denmark Vesey, whose planned 1822 insurrection was revealed to local whites by another slave, Peter Prioleau. In return for this information, white legislators freed Prioleau from bondage and rewarded him with a stipend that he used to purchase his own slaves. Vesey was hanged. Kennedy notes that African-Americans who’ve succeeded in the white world since the civil-rights era are increasingly compelled to pass a black litmus test. They are scrutinized by blacks, and some whites, on style of dress, speech patterns, choice of mate and allegiance (or not) to traditional black values as indicators of their racial authenticity. He devotes a riveting chapter to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a discussion of Thomas’s jurisprudence in several controversial court decisions, Kennedy notes that the “most vilified black official in the history of the United States” has proven himself less the “quintessential sellout” than his critics have feared.
A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42543-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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