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THE WHITE WALL

HOW BIG FINANCE BANKRUPTS BLACK AMERICA

A rousing body of evidence in favor of activist reform of financial practices, from ordinary loans to reparations.

Damning exposé of the essential racism of the American financial system.

There’s a racial wealth gap in America, with numerous hurdles placed in the way of minorities—especially Black men and women—who must contend with differential rates of pay, discriminatory lending, and the inability to accumulate intergenerational wealth. In her debut book, New York Times reporter Flitter examines that story in numerous insightful ways. One reason Black people have trouble getting loans is that there are so few Black financial advisers and bank officers to serve their needs. As the author notes, even Sheila Johnson, one of the wealthiest Black people in America, “with a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” was denied a loan when she tried to launch a luxury resort. Banks routinely issue memos headed “Please Use Caution” that target Black customers, who, it’s seemingly assumed, should not possess large checks. That’s one reason, Flitter points out, that check-cashing businesses flourish in Black neighborhoods, as well as the fact that those businesses are transparent about fees rather than layering on unadvertised charges, as banks do. The fact that there are Black neighborhoods to begin with connects to lending practices that discriminate against Black borrowers, “redlining” mortgages and charging higher rates than those for White customers, and to the fact that Black bank employees who want to track over to the wealthier “private client” side of the house are shunted off to lower-income neighborhoods without high-ticket accounts. Unfortunately, as the author shows, discrimination is everywhere. “It is common knowledge that insurance companies routinely look for reasons to deny claims,” she writes, “and that poor customers’ cases are the easiest to dispose of because those customers are the least likely to fight a denial.” Everywhere the dollar extends, by her searing account, minority communities are excluded.

A rousing body of evidence in favor of activist reform of financial practices, from ordinary loans to reparations.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982183-24-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: One Signal/Atria

Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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