Enthralling evidence that there is less to numbers than meets the eye.
A delightful takedown of our unreasonable worship of numbers.
In 1954, Darrell Huff’s bestselling How To Lie With Statistics began a genre that continues to produce numerous books each year. Stone, a professor at MIT and Brandeis whose specialty is political science and social policy, casts an equally critical eye but delves far more deeply into the subject. To Stone, a number is not a fact but a tool, useful only if we know how it works. When the U.S. Census Bureau announces that Whites are becoming a minority, what’s to argue with? Doesn’t the census merely count? However, the Bureau defines White as a person who checks the “White” box on the form—and none of the 13 other boxes. Checking the “Hispanic” box or both the “Hispanic” and “White” boxes makes you a non-White. Children of mixed marriages are never White, ditto with anyone checking “White” and “Other.” It’s a mess. “Numbers don’t speak for themselves but their creators….More often than not,” writes the author, “numbers are part of somebody’s argument.” They can mean whatever their authors want them to mean, so all are “cooked”—not faked but assembled from various ingredients that vary according to circumstances. If you have any doubts, asking the numbers themselves won’t help; you have to address the authors. As Stone lays out her examples of irrational faith in numbers, readers will squirm, but not with disbelief. Founding Father James Madison’s meticulous, if creepy calculation demonstrating that a Black slave is worth precisely three-fifths of a White freeman will certainly put his statues in peril. Graded according to their death rates, the best hospitals perform badly because they deal with the sickest patients. Graded (and promoted or fired) on how well students score on a standardized test, teachers teach how to take the test.
Enthralling evidence that there is less to numbers than meets the eye.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-592-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
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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