A well-researched, cleareyed deconstruction of highly flawed conventional wisdom about Africa.
A trenchant study demolishes stereotypes about Africans as a product of colonial history.
Faloyin—a senior editor at VICE who was born in Chicago and raised in Lagos until age 10, when he moved to the U.K.—opens his stern and vibrant narrative with the secret 1884 “Scramble for Africa” meeting in Berlin by European powers. “In an attempt to avoid all-out war over who got to wage war on Africa,” writes the author, “the mighty colonialists decided to meet and hash it all out, to come to a communal understanding as to how they could perfectly calculate their siege.” While many nations had already embarked on expeditions into the continent to seize natural resources and quell Indigenous uprisings, by the beginning of World War I, “90 per cent of Africa would be controlled by Europe.” The establishment of arbitrary borders often divided ethnic groups, some of whom later went to war with each other. Throughout the book, Faloyin diligently chronicles the inherited tropes that many in the West harbor about African nations. “The narrative,” he writes, “suggests there is something fundamentally ungovernable about this place and its people; something extremely uncivilized about their unhealthy relationship with power.” This “silent bigotry” involves the concept of White savior syndrome—yet another form of paternalism—as evinced by the Invisible Children project in Uganda and such celebrity charity campaigns as We Are the World and Live Aid. The author examines a series of dictatorships that resulted from colonial systems of divide and rule and forcefully calls out glaring cultural stereotypes about Africans in popular culture. He also addresses the alarming fact that “90 per cent of Africa’s material cultural legacy is being kept outside of the continent.” Faloyin weaves in his personal story as a Nigerian, using the making of Jollof rice as a unifying theme, and ends the book with forward-looking ways that African countries are managing gender and sexual violence, climate change, and other pressing matters.
A well-researched, cleareyed deconstruction of highly flawed conventional wisdom about Africa.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-88153-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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