An inspiring collection.
An entrepreneur and two-time NAACP Image Award winner profiles successful black women from across the globe working in all fields of endeavor.
In 2006, Bond founded BLACK GIRLS ROCK! to empower young black girls and women and celebrate their achievements. The movement arose from the author’s personal history of struggle in a white-dominated world that denigrated black females for everything from the way they looked to what they said and did. Meant to serve as a companion to that movement, this book gathers interviews, editorials, personal essays, and photos that spotlight more than 60 influential black women including Michelle Obama, Rebecca Walker, Serena Williams, and Janelle Monáe. Each of the nine sections celebrates different aspects of what Bond calls “Black Girl Magic”: “a power and energy rooted in black ancestral traditions, spirituality, and sacred feminine wisdom.” The book opens with a declaration from Michelle Obama that “the secret to everything in life…is education.” Building on the former first lady’s sentiments, Walker emphasizes the need for black women to help others envision a “more pluralistic, intersectional, and reciprocal in its justice-seeking” women's movement. To develop the fortitude that is at the heart of all success, tennis champion Serena Williams speaks of the need for black girls to engage in competitive sports to build “confidence…self-awareness and pride.” But as Monáe suggests, it is also important for black girls and women to be in “full control of [their] magic and how [they] choose to use it.” To live true to one’s identity—rather than society’s ideas about that identity—is the ultimate necessity and freedom. Rich in collective wisdom, Bond’s book is aimed primarily at a black female audience, but the courage, grace, passion, and intelligence that characterize each of the separate narratives are sure to motivate any woman seeking to succeed in a (white) man’s world.
An inspiring collection.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5792-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
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
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