A brilliant and thought-provoking study of Black literacy in America.
Chronicling the history of Black reading and writing.
This important history argues that the teaching of reading to people of African ancestry, from the antebellum period onward, has been perceived as a great threat to entrenched political and social power. It tells the story of men and women who risked their lives to learn—to read and write. In the process, they sought to educate their peers to make them participants in American democracy. Figures such as Denmark Vesey, Daniel Payne, Susie King Taylor, and Charlotte Forten come alive in the author’s vivid prose. This book shows them to be as important in the history of Black freedom as more familiar writers such as Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. Douglass famously wrote that if you teach a Black man “how to read, there will be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, builds on Douglass’ observation to show that the fight for freedom is the fight for literacy—whether that fight went on in the plantations of the 1830s, the schoolrooms of the Reconstruction era, or the courts of the 20th century. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education takes on a new meaning in the context of the fight for Black people to go to school, not just to be socially integrated but to be as literate and powerful as all Americans. The author concludes: “Though it is a functional skill, literacy is more than that. Enslaved and freed people’s literacy journeys are journeys of becoming—becoming whatever it was they hoped and dreamed to be and had the capacity to be. They are stories of people taking full ownership of their personal destiny.” In our own time, when voters are again subjected to tests of reading and identity, when books are being banned, and when access to truth is challenged by disinformation, the stories of the brave men and women in this book stand out as moral lessons for the modern reader.
A brilliant and thought-provoking study of Black literacy in America.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780300272826
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
