Not without flaws, but a compellingly honest manifesto about authenticity.
The famous Black radio and TV personality makes the case for raising the bar on the quality of our conversations.
Charlamagne Tha God, author of Black Privilege, hates small talk. Rather than using the traditional definition of small talk as idle chatter, the author describes it as “a symbol of our lack of authentic communication. Both as individuals and collectively.” Throughout the book, he provides examples of types of small talk and the damage that it can do. In one chapter, he discusses how right-wing politicians often excel at unvarnished, blunt conversation, a trend that garners them votes while politicians like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris—whom the author admires—lose support due to their perceived lack of authenticity. Elsewhere, the author critiques his own history of emulating “shock jocks” and states his new commitment to elevating the level of conversation on his morning radio show, The Breakfast Club. He also spends time criticizing the social media landscape that has led to young people’s sense of “entitlement” that he feels is both detrimental to their development and uncharacteristic of previous generations. “Back in the day,” he writes, “no one felt the need to put on a front when they were just starting out.” Throughout, Charlamagne returns to the premise that honest conversations can change the world. “Now I want to encourage you to make rejecting small talk a priority in your life,” he pleads, “because small talk is killing us as a society.” The author’s voice is frank, funny, and intimate, and his capacity for vulnerability drives his storytelling. At times, his signature brashness crosses the line—as, for instance, when he unnecessarily repeats verbatim a homophobic joke his father used to tell—and his analysis can lean toward the patriarchal.
Not without flaws, but a compellingly honest manifesto about authenticity.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781982173791
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Black Privilege Publishing/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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