A useful summary account of “a rigorous political philosophy and mode of direct political engagement that provides an...
A scholar refocuses the issue from “not racist” to “antiracist” and from white to black.
“Prevailing cultural and academic understandings of antiracism typically focus on white Americans,” writes Zamalin (Political Science and African-American Studies/Univ. of Detroit Mercy; African American Political Thought and American Culture: The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice, 2015, etc.), “at the expense of those who have offered the most sustained critique of what racism is and how to dismantle it: black Americans.” Though patience may not be a virtue for those who have struggled too long for too little recompense, this book has more of the measured tone of an introduction to the notion of antiracism rather than the polemical urgency of a manifesto. The author provides valuable historical context on the social construct of racial identity, the structural construct of institutional racism, the global reach of the antiracist mission, and the struggles that have persisted from the Declaration of Independence through the abolitionist movement and the Civil War, through the issues of employment and education, and through the back-to-back elections of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Regarding Obama, writes Zamalin, “an important antiracist opportunity was…lost throughout his presidency. The participatory democratic energy that got him into office was never sustained.” The Obama years saw the initial stirrings of the Black Lives Matter movement—the author gives him credit for not repudiating it or distancing himself—alongside the polarization that led to the Trump backlash. Zamalin’s vision is pragmatic with a touch of idealism. He doesn’t necessarily place moral superiority on nonviolence over more militant tactics, and he recognizes that black rebellion intensifies resistance from a conservative status quo. As he insists throughout, it is not enough to believe that you are not racist; you must actively work against racism in all its institutional and insidious forms.
A useful summary account of “a rigorous political philosophy and mode of direct political engagement that provides an exemplary model for tackling racism in all forms.”Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-2263-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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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