New York Times Magazine editor Copage follows up 1991's much- lauded Kwanzaa: An African-American Celebration of Culture and Cooking with an uninspired meant-to-inspire YA-ish coming-of-age story set during the African-American holiday. Thirteen-year-old Jordan Garrison is growing up in an idealistically drawn middle-class black suburb with his father, grandmother, and eight-year-old twin brother and sister. Jordan's mother died just after the twins were born, and his father is now the driving force of the household, cooking up big plates of jambalaya, reprimanding Jordan for not properly drying the lettuce for the salad, and constantly reminding the boy of his impending responsibility ``to become a Black man.'' Jordan can't understand what seems to be his father's obsession with black manhood, and when his father suffers a fatal heart attack, he no longer has a chance to ask him about it. With his father gone, though, the pressures toward manhood only increase. Snackman, the dashiki- wearing, African-history-espousing owner of the corner store, gives Jordan an aging piece of kente cloth to inspire him to an awareness of race. Snackman is locally famous for his window displays on black history, especially during Kwanzaa, the late December harvest holiday invented in 1966. Jordan's responsibilities are also increased when his grandmother takes an evening job and Jordan has to babysit the twins every night. Eventually, he rebels against these pressures by hanging out with some bad kids, skipping classes, and showing disrespect to Snackman. When, just before Kwanzaa, Jordan's friend J.B. challenges him to steal $500 from the store, Jordan must prove whether he's now ready to become ``a black man.'' The language is stiff, the symbolism thick, and the revelations of the meanings of Kwanzaa will be too scant for most readers: altogether, a ho-hum holiday tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13968-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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