A scrupulously reported, gracefully told, exquisitely paced debut.
Centering on a single episode, a powerful declaration of conscience, a Washington Post reporter tells an intensely unsettling story about living with our nuclear arsenal.
In July 2012, cutting through fences topped with razor wire and avoiding guards, guns, sensors, armored cars, and alarms, an 80-year-old nun, a Vietnam veteran, and a housepainter, all deeply religious, all affiliated with the pacifist Plowshares movement, broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the “Fort Knox of Uranium.” Carrying hammers, cans of spray paint, a loaf of bread, seeds, bottles of blood, banners, and a written “message” explaining their action, the protestors spent hours inside the facility before their arrests. Was this security breach “a miracle,” as supporters claimed, or a “catastrophe,” as the government labeled it? Or was it both? Zak demonstrates that this strange and awful duality has been at the heart of the nuclear weapons debate from the beginning. Was the atom bomb’s first detonation, as President Harry Truman said, “the greatest thing in history,” or was it, as one of the scientists who first imagined it remarked, one of history’s “greatest blunders?” Using this trespass against Y-12, the activists’ biographies, arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonments, Zak skillfully intersperses a wider story, with nuances about the minds behind the bomb, so many of them populating the physics department at Columbia University, which taught the young Megan Rice, who’d grow up to become the protesting nun. New York was also ground zero for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, spiritual ancestor to the Berrigan brothers and today’s Plowshares anti-nuclear activists. While the author’s sympathies clearly lie with his protagonists, the narrative plays fair. Zak soberly recounts the Manhattan Project’s origins, charts the growth and development of the Oak Ridge facility, forthrightly assesses the difficulties surrounding arms reduction and security, and demonstrates the sheer persistence of problems relating to all things nuclear. More than anything, though, it’s the moral convictions demonstrated by Zak’s three holy fools that will remain with readers.
A scrupulously reported, gracefully told, exquisitely paced debut.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17375-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
PROFILES
Not an easy read but an essential one.
Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
As pretentious as it is outlandish, but at least authentically mind-boggling.
An encyclopedic, lavishly illustrated attempt to discern an alternative-belief system in the broad diversity of ancient paganism and mystical offshoots of the major faiths.
“Christianity contains a hidden tradition of the gods of the stars and planets,” proclaims British publishing executive Booth. While much of this tradition, including biblical allegories, has been denigrated by Mother Church, it has hardly been hidden. The author’s mystical guardian institutions include the Christian-associated Freemasons and Rosicrucians, which both arose at the outset of the 18th century from earlier origins; Cabalism on the Hebrew side; and Sufism from Islam. Much of the problem with this roughly chronological narrative is its hazy documentation: Readers must be content with “a friend of mine” or “an initiate I met” as substantiating sources. Likewise, we must accept Booth’s own innate ability to peer into antiquity and presume the influence of “mystery schools” on such figures as Plato. He seamlessly moves from reportage to proselytizing, presenting for instance a precise date in the 12th millennium BCE as the moment when matter reached its final solidified state in the progression of existence from pure thought (preceding matter itself) through a “human vegetable” state to the present form. Tracing this progression, Booth cites all kinds of permutations, fairy tales and familiar hippie spiritualist icons along the way. Humankind loses its third eye, can no longer directly interact with spirits and deities, must be content with the stifling restrictions of the scientific method to comprehend creation, etc. One culminating highlight: George Washington, a known Freemason, decrees that the capital city be laid out to reflect the geometry of the constellation Virgo, thus inviting “the mother goddess” to participate in determining the future of the United States. Somebody should tell President Bush to please get in touch.
As pretentious as it is outlandish, but at least authentically mind-boggling.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-031-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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