Another volume inspired by The Case That Would Not End, which only fitfully addresses its subject: the dilemma that African-Americans face when they must use the authority and responsibility they have obtained in a white-dominated system against members of their own race. A few of the pieces are interesting, though nothing here is likely to change anyone's mind. Cose, a Newsweek contributing editor who has written perceptively on race and other social issues (Color-Blind, 1997, etc.), artfully compares Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden and defense counsel Johnny Cochran respectively to Joe Frazier, the black heavyweight champ who was acceptable to whites, and Muhammad Ali, who became a black idol by symbolically outfighting and outwitting white America (before time and success made Ali a white idol, too). Stanley Crouch portrays Darden as a whiner who did a lousy job on what should not have been a difficult case. Former prosecutor Paul Butler reprises his controversial view that black jurors should sometimes ignore the letter of the law, since the system is fatally biased against black defendants. Clarence Page notes that Darden became a ``double outsider, cast out by outcasts,'' when he tried to convict Simpson. Anita Hill thoughtfully and persuasively analyzes the particular dilemmas faced by black women when black men are subjected to the criminal justice system; she focuses on the example of Felicia Moon, who recanted an accusation that her football-star husband, Warren, had assaulted her. The best is saved for last, with Roger Wilkins's eloquent reminder of the historic importance—and possibility—of successful blacks' efforts ``to tell the truth for people who cannot speak for themselves because of the damage that continues to be done to them.'' Unfortunately, most of these essays pay little attention to the book's theme, and several read like annual reports on the state of race relations in America.
Pub Date: March 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-095227-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Good-humored essays that chronicle an oddball odyssey through the urban outback. It's neither pristine river nor virgin forest that rattles the affable Rockland's wandering bones, but that awkward border—in the wilderness or in the city—where nature and man's handiwork collide. Chair of American Studies at Rutgers Univ., Rockland (A Bliss Case, 1989) undertakes a series of decidedly unscholarly treks across the wilds of the Northeast corridor. In his search for adventure, he boldly goes where no man wants to go: kayaking the south Jersey meadows in January; camping in Manhattan's Inwood Park; biking Route 1, known as ``Death Highway,'' through Newark, N.J. Prowling the forgotten canals and the traffic- and retail- choked highways of Megalopolis, the unlikely ``new frontier'' that sprawls from New York to Philly, he finds a Whitmanesque splendor in the flotsam of the industrial age. Seeking to ``redefine adventure in contemporary terms,'' he brings it within reach of the average schlepper: No triathlete, Rockland knows when to bag the tent and check into a motel. Hiking all 275 blocks of Broadway, as he does in ``Copping a Pee in the Big Apple,'' requires no superhuman effort. It is, however, a charmingly contrarian way to view the world. That charm—and his self-mocking style, boyish enthusiasm, and unrepentant (but harmless) male chauvinism—lend a refreshing tone to the contrapuntal ruminations on wildlife, geology, urban myth, Indian history, and the pleasures of PB&J scattered throughout his love song to postmodern America. Rockland delights in camp as much as any devotee of pop culture, but his inquiry into the things consumer culture values, then abandons (and the snapshots he presents of our deteriorating cities) forms a powerful cautionary tale. Perfect for armchair travelers or urban adventurers looking for new ideas.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8135-2115-7
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
An authoritative study of the emergence of Jewish studies on the American campus. Sociologists have noted that access to and achievement in higher education facilitated the entrance of American Jews into the economic and cultural mainstream. Ritterband (Jewish Studies and Sociology/City College, CUNY) and Wechsler (Education and Human Development/Univ. of Rochester) remind us that, as a widespread phenomenon, this is recent; until the 1950s and early 1960s some Ivy League schools had quotas for Jewish students and faculty. But at the turn of the century, in a small but pivotal group of American universities, there were quite a few Jewish students, and a smaller proportion of faculty members who were offering courses on Jewish subjects, often under the rubric of Semitic Studies. The authors focus on six of these schools—Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of California, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1875 and 1925 these schools offered courses in ancient Near Eastern languages, biblical archaeology, and comparative philology. As the authors note, ``The American Semitics professorate contained a goodly proportion of Jews who commanded sufficient resources to assume the subject's inclusion.'' By the mid-1920s academic anti-Semitism and a shift in the priorities of American Jews precipitated a sharp decline in both Jewish student enrollments and course offerings in Judaica. All of higher education was in the throes of change, and subjects as esoteric as biblical criticism and comparative philology were seen as irrelevant. The book, which ends with the proliferation of Jewish Studies programs in the 1970s, has wider implications than its title would indicate: regarding the value of a liberal education, the contents of the much-disputed literary canon, and the structuring of the college curriculum, which, the authors note, ``is rarely invented from a coherent rational plan.'' This analysis of an important American educational story is somewhat plodding and dry, but the end result is coherent and insightful.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-253-35039-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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