A highly useful, educative tool to navigate our weaponized racial discourse.
Fiery critique of how the semantics and signifiers of Whiteness maintain comforting historical illusions while upholding structural racism.
In this wide-ranging and deeply felt narrative, Mura moves confidently among American history, literary critique, and social analysis, laying bare the secret terrors and coded defenses of being Black in America. Now in his 60s, the author brings a blended perspective to his subject. “I come to race as a Sansei, a third-generation Japanese American…mine was a family that fervently believed in an assimilation into Whiteness. The internment camps criminalized my parents’ race and ethnicity.” This background informs his central argument about the artificiality of traditional (White) narratives, dependent on smothering Black perspectives and experience under the crushing oppression of White supremacy. “The problem isn’t what white people have done to Black people,” writes the author, “but that Black people keep remembering what white people have done—and somehow that harms white people and victimizes them.” Mura brackets the text with the police killings of Philando Castile and Daunte Wright, both of which occurred in Minnesota, the author’s home state. Such violence, he writes, is “a direct result of the ways that whites have enforced and interpreted the dictates of race, the ways whites have tried to script not only their own lives but the lives of people of color.” Mura examines the foundational racism of Jefferson and even Lincoln as well as the post–Civil War establishment of the Lost Cause myth as the legal underpinnings for Jim Crow. Other topics include the prescience of James Baldwin and how novelists including Jonathan Franzen and Toni Morrison choose to address race. Mura combines academic discourse, historical and literary analysis, and polemical outrage; the chapters build to a crescendo, using rhythm and repetition to return to uneasy, fundamental truths about American racial mythologies. While his discussion can be overly repetitive or didactic, it captures the guardedness that necessarily informs Black life in contemporary America.
A highly useful, educative tool to navigate our weaponized racial discourse.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781452968438
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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