An extensively researched and vividly personal overview of the inequities faced by Black people in America.
Harris takes a wide-ranging look at the state of racial injustice in the United States in this nonfiction debut.
The author, a novelist and a co-founder of Black Catholic Messenger, relates the 2023 story of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Black man with an extensive history of arrests and mental illness who was panhandling New York City subway passengers for money when a white man named Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold and killed him. “I could have been Jordan Neely,” Harris writes, reflecting that she, too, had experienced periods of homelessness and had suffered a mental breakdown. This personal resonance runs through her book, which looks at the systemic oppression of Black people throughout United States history, detailing the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of the Jim Crow South, and the prevalence of what’s referred to here as “neoslavery” in the present day. The author examines racial disparities in the death penalty, incarceration rates (per a 2013 ACLU report, 65.4% of U.S. prisoners serving life sentences without parole for nonviolent offenses are Black, and the likelihood of lifetime incarceration for Black men is 4 times higher than for white men in the same age bracket), racial profiling, overpolicing, and “extrajudicial” police murders. She notes that millions of Black students live in poor neighborhoods where schools resemble prisons and are “more often armed with cops than counselors, psychologists, or nurses.” The text is extensively sourced and annotated, with many studies being both cited and quoted at length, but it’s Harris’ personal and passionate voice that creates the book’s strongest impression. Racial issues are scathingly addressed, but almost equally sharp is the author’s analysis of the U.S. prison system, which incarcerates 2 million people (larger in absolute numbers and by population percentage than any other country in history); she notes that 75% of people held in jails are there simply because they can’t pay bail. The cumulative effect of the work is powerfully sobering.
An extensively researched and vividly personal overview of the inequities faced by Black people in America.Pub Date: May 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781626985421
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
