A coolly delivered yet impassioned study of how much Trump’s election has shifted and revealed Americans’ thinking about...
A black writer tussles with race in the Trump era, taking his questions directly to the president’s supporters.
At the opening of this graceful and searching clutch of essays, Thompson (Twin of Blackness, 2015, etc.) explains that, at age 54, he’s at a crossroads. He’s long tried to think of race through the lens of idols like James Baldwin and Albert Murray, alert to racism but slow to anger over it, comfortable with white people while feeling that, often, “being American means being white.” But Trump’s election, and the racism it has exposed and often supported, has left Thompson unsettled. Taking his cue from another idol, Joan Didion, the author levelheadedly assesses the state of his racial temperament through memoir and reportage. He recalls his experience with race as a student and writer; his interactions with the children he’s raised and mentored; and the comfort he’s taken in jazz as a proxy for working through those struggles (these sections contain the author’s most lyrical writing). The heart of the book is Thompson’s reporting on interviews he conducted with three Trump supporters after the election to understand “what was going on in this country about which I had developed such uncertain feelings.” They’re not fire-breathing racists, but their masks as freedom-loving Americans often slip, revealing casually bigoted attitudes about blacks and Hispanics. Triangulating those conversations with chats with a Bronx-based nonprofit leader and the head of the National African American Gun Association, Thompson concludes that the most pernicious problem America faces regarding race, “the cold heart of the trouble,” isn’t ignorance or outright bigotry but indifference. The author isn’t despairing, but the book concludes with a sense that there’s plenty more work to do.
A coolly delivered yet impassioned study of how much Trump’s election has shifted and revealed Americans’ thinking about race.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-905-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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.
Atlantic senior 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
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
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