An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.
Education can be liberating. However, as this provocative survey demonstrates, it can also uphold the worst of the status quo.
“As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears…there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ ” The authors of that statement were Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, two eminent historians whose work is still studied today. As Yacovone, an associate at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African American Research, observes, the textbook in which that spectacularly racist—and incorrect—statement occurs was a standard for many years. Beginning with the founding of the republic, writes Yacovone, textbooks have been primary instruments for transmitting “ideas of white American identity,” even asserting that this identity is definitively White and that, as one 1896 textbook stated, “to the Caucasian race by reason of its physical and mental superiority has been assigned the task of civilizing and enlightening the world.” Current textbooks have plenty of problems, as well. Yacovone points out that only in the last decade have Texas history textbooks acknowledged slavery, and not states’ rights, as the primary cause of the Civil War. It is from history textbooks, he adds, that the terms White supremacy and master race entered the lexicon, and it has been from textbooks that excuses for the subjugation of some peoples and extermination of others have found learned justification. Even textbooks—and Yacovone has pored over hundreds—that condemned the secessionist movement were often inclined to consider the enslaved population as “a degraded and inferior people.” Interestingly, the author links some of the worst excesses to the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War era, when textbook publishers and authors were avid to erase differences between North and South—White differences, anyway.
An outstanding contribution to the historical literature of American racism and racist ideologies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31663-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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 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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