A compelling argument for long-overdue reparations—though much more than that alone.
Humanities scholar Ford looks at the myriad—and uncompensated—contributions African Americans have made to the economies and cultures of the U.S. and beyond.
The author opens with a little-known court case from Colonial Virginia wherein an indentured Black man sued not just for release from his expired contract, but also for “freedom dues.” Perhaps surprisingly, the court ruled in his favor, voicing “a belief that power and wealth created from the labor of others entitled those who helped create that power and wealth to their fair share.” Unfortunately, the enslaved far outnumbered the indentured and were accorded no such entitlement. As Ford observes, the slave trade by its very nature had ripple effects that enriched societies such as early modern Holland, whose banks financed shipbuilding. For their part, the enslaved afforded not just labor, building such infrastructure as the water system that still fuels Washington, D.C., and, of course, the entire agricultural economy of the American South. Their lack of liberty afforded their owners freedom: If not for the labor of the enslaved, the White farmers of the Colonial South could never have mounted a revolution against Britain—a revolution that helped shore up slavery. Ford writes of the lives of the first enslaved people to arrive in British North America, turning up little-known episodes and figures in American history—e.g., the multiracial Melungeon people of Appalachia and the celebration among Black residents of upstate New York of Emancipation Day: not June 19, Juneteenth, but instead Aug. 1, when slavery was outlawed in the British Empire in 1834, “freeing some 800,000 men and women in the West Indies, South Africa, and Canada.” The book teems with ideas, sometimes in an onrushing embarrassment of riches, and often repeats the inarguable idea that as makers of much of the modern world’s wealth, Black people continue to deserve a share.
A compelling argument for long-overdue reparations—though much more than that alone.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-303851-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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