An impassioned argument for public acts of resistance.
A political scientist calls for disruptive protests to combat racism.
The director of the African-American Studies Program at the University of Detroit, Mercy, Zamalin shows how, throughout U.S. history, calls for civility have been “a tool for silencing dissent, repressing political participation, enforcing economic inequality, and justifying violence upon people of color.” Most recently, he points out, civility has been invoked as a way to combat the divisiveness incited by the Trump administration, but Zamalin asserts that civility in everyday life is different from civility in the political “arena of power and struggle.” He advocates disruptive direct action—what he calls “civic radicalism”—that has as its goal “liberation for all, regardless of who disagrees.” Offering a vivid, though generally familiar, history of racism in the U.S., the author contrasts those who promoted civility with those who urged public protests: Booker T. Washington, for example, against Frederick Douglass. Douglass, Zamalin writes, “saw misuse of power, division, contestation, deceit, and hypocrisy everywhere he looked. But Washington saw the unachieved promise of racial reconciliation, forgiveness, generosity, and compromise” and therefore urged Blacks to keep their place—advice that racists welcomed. Racial reconciliation, Zamalin cautions, “is something of which we must be wary. This is because it can sidestep collective responsibility and instead become about confessing individual guilt, which is no recipe for changing history. Guilt is a depressive emotion that makes one withdraw rather than take action.” Martin Luther King Jr. saw as his greatest adversary not the Ku Klux Klan “but the white moderate basking in civility, the rules of which dictated compromise and mutual respect.” Zamalin is heartened by recent street protests over racism, inequality, and police brutality, noting that media coverage focusing on the protesters’ violence recalls “the civil versus uncivil distinctions elites have always used to interpret popular anti-racist uprisings throughout history.”
An impassioned argument for public acts of resistance.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2654-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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