An acerbic and laser-focused demand for restorative racial justice from an ardent advocate.
In his fifth book, the comedian and activist continues his diatribe against the country’s “chronic illness” of systemic racism.
Throughout his latest, written in roughly the same blunt, no-nonsense style as How Not To Get Shot and Surrender, White People! Hughley focuses on the preposterous assumption that minority populations are predisposed to—and mostly to blame for—the injustices they’re forced to endure. Writing with frequent contributor Moe, Hughley combines his comedic talents with personal history and experience as a political commentator to address glaring discrepancies between White and Black populations regarding overall health, access to health care, toxic environments, educational bias, and violence. The author excoriates much of the former presidential administration, especially Jerome Adams and Ben Carson, for callously placing the blame for rising Covid-19 infections on the minority communities where cases were spiking. The author also shows how even wearing a mask during a pandemic can be dangerous for a Black person: “COVID-19 is deadly, but it doesn’t kill you as fast as a suspicious cop.” This statement seamlessly leads into discussions of the senseless deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others as well as criticisms of the lack of Black executives at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and other conglomerates. Naturally and appropriately, Donald Trump bears the brunt of the author’s vitriol. “We knew Trump was gonna be a disaster,” writes the author, “but I don’t think anyone could have predicted that this motherfucker would get so many people killed before we could vote him out.” Hughley is palpably exasperated by the ineffectiveness of racial equality movements and the generational trickle-down effects of systemic racism. More darkly humorous, with fewer laugh-out-loud moments than Surrender, this book, saturated with justified anger and frustration, speaks to the fact that persistent racism in the U.S. is no laughing matter.
An acerbic and laser-focused demand for restorative racial justice from an ardent advocate.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-307275-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
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