Occasionally a drag, and Moore could have provided more examples, but this is a work of honesty and, yes, integrity.
An indie journalist and activist rummages around in the messy subjects of integrity and selling out, and asks how to clearly define one or the other.
In 2005, packages were mailed to zine-makers, small publishers and other indie luminaries with cool and authentically DIY-looking Star Wars–themed stickers and T-shirts. Although they were part of a Lucasfilm marketing push for Revenge of the Sith, the company’s name appeared nowhere. More recently, well-known graffiti artists were hired by Sony to tag buildings with cleverly disguised ad copy. When caught by police, they received miniscule fines compared to the severe punishment handed down to spray-paint vandals not endorsed by a multinational corporation. Moore (Hey, Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People, 2004, etc.) hashes out these hard-to-parse subjects and more in her discursive, repetitive, tendentious and ultimately quite well-considered meditation on the difficulty of maintaining integrity in an age defined by “our big fat remix culture.” The first great temptation for selling out to corporate interests is simple: It pays better, and once indie artists start getting into middle age, accumulating responsibilities, children and the like, it’s ever harder to resist that siren call. Also, when the corporate strategies are spearheaded by people (like the folks at Lucasfilm mentioned above) who genuinely appreciate what they’re attempting to co-opt, it becomes more difficult to say that one’s work is being compromised. While there are always good and hard-to-dismiss reasons for selling out on limited occasions, Moore ultimately concludes that the branding’s creepy, virus-like spread into nearly every aspect of our lives should be resisted, before it wipes out independent culture and integrity (however hard to define). Already, she sadly notes, “Marketing has become so diffuse as to be a social activity…The infiltration is complete: there is no Us versus Them anymore.”
Occasionally a drag, and Moore could have provided more examples, but this is a work of honesty and, yes, integrity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59558-168-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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