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THE ULTIMATE HIDDEN TRUTH OF THE WORLD...

ESSAYS

One hopes for more from the Graeber archive, but this makes for a fine overview of his cage-rattling career.

Essays on politics, culture, and economics by the late anthropologist and activist.

An anarchist philosopher at heart, Graeber was known in his too-short life for book-length explorations of democracy as practiced by Indigenous people, pirates, and rebels, as well as denunciations of capitalism and its—his term—bullshit jobs. The essays here open on a contrarian, controversial note: If there is such a thing as Western civilization, “a particularly incoherent concept,” it’s demonstrably “just as hostile to anything we would recognize as democracy as those of India, China, or Mesoamerica.” A look around at the current political landscape, to say nothing of the polities of ancient Greece and Rome, would certainly back up the notion, but Graeber probes further, noting, for instance, that when the Portuguese colonized parts of South Asia, an Arab legal scholar advised an Indian ruler that it was legitimate to declare jihad “specifically because they destroyed a tolerant, pluralistic society in which Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Jews had always managed to coexist.” Coexistence seems more problematic these days, but Graeber holds that the most meaningful strides toward it, and toward democracy itself, happen when communities decide to “manage their own affairs outside the purview of the state.” Examining economics—one piece is a dialogue with French economist Thomas Piketty—Graeber renews his call for meaningful work, for a state that does not rely on personal taxes, and for resistance to power based on coercion and violence. Nika Dubrovsky’s introduction quotes Jorge Luis Borges: “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” Certainly that’s true of Graeber, to whose always readable books this should certainly be added.

One hopes for more from the Graeber archive, but this makes for a fine overview of his cage-rattling career.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024

ISBN: 9780374610227

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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