Smart and chatty hip-hop history.
The Public Enemy MC heads to the classroom to discuss hip-hop’s politics and aesthetics.
In 2022, Chuck D led a 10-week course at UCLA via the school’s Hip Hop Initiative (part of its African American Studies department) as its first artist in residence. He was an excellent fit for the role—Public Enemy songs routinely addressed systemic racism, the prison industrial complex, media bias, and other injustices. But in this book, based on transcripts from his residency, he’s neither snootily professorial nor just an OG unspooling war stories. Rather, he’s a thoughtful interlocutor with other scholars and academics, discussing the roles that immigration (both to the United States and within it) played in hip-hop’s evolution, how capitalism bolstered the genre while limiting its range, how hip-hop is reshaped in different countries and by different races, its capacity for affecting political change, and more. Guest speakers deliver thoughtful commentaries—especially Jeff Chang, author of the authoritative hip-hop history Can’t Stop Won’t Stop; Lamontagne, who’s studied French rappers; and Black feminist scholar Joan Morgan. Though Chuck D didn’t lead the course alone, in conversation he steers discussions toward a few core themes—the importance of understanding history, the need for artists to work collectively and seize the means of production, and the need to see hip-hop as a sonic genre over a visual one. (He regularly bemoans how personal devices have wrecked the attention spans of young and old, who he calls “screenagers.”) The book’s formatting as transcripts has its upsides: It embeds the academic discussion in an accessible, often good-humored context, and makes room for student questions. But the conversations sometimes meander, with some subjects crying out for context beyond brief endnotes. Still, it’s a valuable chronicle of the genre’s role in troubled times—and how the times have always been troubled.
Smart and chatty hip-hop history.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780520427396
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
