A compelling account of technology-powered protest.
The credo of a Black Lives Matter activist.
Former school administrator Mckesson won prominence in 2014 after joining protests against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, where he used social media to document 400 days in the streets being “pepper sprayed, smoke bombed, and shot at with rubber bullets.” Now in his early 30s and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, the author grew up the son of drug addicts in Baltimore and worked as a teenage community organizer. “We took to the streets as a matter of life and death,” he writes of Ferguson. “What else could we do?” In this deeply felt debut, he combines memoir with discussions of race and violence in America, offering an inside view of the BLM movement. “In each generation there is a moment when young and old, inspired or disillusioned, come together around a shared hope, imagine the world as it can be, and have the opportunity to bring that world into existence,” he writes. “Our moment is now.” Mckesson makes a strong case for social media as the key rallying point for this latest protest movement: “Twitter saved our lives,” he writes, explaining how the “new tactic for a new time” allows demonstrators to organize and tell their stories to one another and the nation. Much of the book focuses on police violence; together with others, the author created Mapping Police Violence, a national database on people killed by police. Such killings—1,200 people each year, with blacks three times more likely to be victims than whites—represent a “systemic” problem in which police control of information allows them to create an “uncontested narrative” and union contracts prevent accountability. In exploring his personal story of growing up a much-bullied gay black youth, Mckesson notes how comic-book superheroes taught him “how to imagine” a different America based on faith (that things will be better) and hope (that they can be).
A compelling account of technology-powered protest.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-56032-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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