by Debra J. Dickerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 13, 2004
Arguments that are crisply delivered and guaranteed to irritate vast constituencies.
A full-bore assault on white racism on one hand and black orthodoxies on the other, one that finds the author well-prepared for the inevitable backlash.
At which point, journalist Dickerson (An American Story, 2000) says, “the next time a ‘new Afrikan’ steps up to me at one of my readings . . . and questions my Negritude for my interracial marriage or my insufficient (to them) engagement with the black community, they better come loaded for bear.” Black America is too diverse to be stereotyped, she suggests, and far too many blacks are enjoying material and social advantages that are historically supposed to be beyond them to believe that the old laws of racism have as much force as they used to—illustrating, in one of her rare instances of cheerleading, that “no one can stop the American, black or blind, who is determined to succeed.” Which is not to say that racism is not a reality—it is, and the author offers a repellent catalogue of ongoing sins by white against black. But, she adds, blacks need to stop relying on racism as a means for explaining failure, to stop presuming that “the moral high ground [can] be bequeathed like a hereditary title or a trust fund.” Instead, Dickerson argues, the black community should look toward the future: “It is time to chart black life after the movement.” By way of example, she points to the successes of hip-hop entrepreneurs such as Russell Simmons and Chuck D, who “are exerting powerful, politicized, and well-financed leadership among their peers, all with little recourse to, or much respect for, the civil rights establishment.” One sign of that leadership, she writes, is the emergence of “hip-hop politicians” running against “movement blacks” in New York and New Jersey. Of any politician, whether old-school or new-, she counsels, the questions need be asked, “Would she know what to do with herself if white racism ended tomorrow? How invested in continued black failure has he become?”
Arguments that are crisply delivered and guaranteed to irritate vast constituencies.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42157-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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edited by Debra J. Dickerson & Gerald Early
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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