A timely, courageous contribution to the debate regarding racial justice in America.
A memoir of a life devoted to defending civil rights and a scathing critique of that movement’s unfortunate decline.
Trebach (Fatal Distraction, 2006, etc.) has previously written about the criminal justice system’s abuse of minorities. He was a committed activist in the 1950s and ’60sand an official at the Civil Rights Commission, and he’s been a lifelong Democratic liberal and supporter of Barack Obama. However, he argues that the civil rights movement, and liberalism in general, has betrayed the original spirit of its cause and corroded race relations in America with craven political opportunism, incendiary race-baiting and a climate of censorship. “The race card is why our racial atmosphere is so poisonous, when we should be enjoying color-blind relations everywhere,” he writes. “That evil card is played so frequently these days that many of us sometimes don’t realize just how often it is used.” Trebach looks at the Trayvon Martin shooting case; he says that some people willfully appropriated the tragedy for the sake of declaiming racial prejudice, and he skillfully presents little-covered but pertinent details of that incident. He also considers what he feels are the abandoned promises of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to usher the United States into a proudly post-racial era. The most unsettling target of Trebach’s analysis, though, is African-American crime, which continues to balloon at an alarming pace. He argues that intolerance of open discussion and the reflex to denounce as racist any attempt to fully investigate such crime’s causes have impeded good-faith attempts to alleviate the problem. In general, the author contends, programs that are designed by self-appointed representatives of African-Americans tend to deliver more harm than good. Written in plain prose that brims with disillusionment, this book makes an impassioned call for a politics truly free of racial discrimination, in keeping with the tenets of one of the author’s heroes, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Overall, Trebach brings a wealth of academic expertise and personal experience to these thoughtful reflections.
A timely, courageous contribution to the debate regarding racial justice in America.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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