Intelligent, spirited, and especially valuable to budding activists and first-time voters.
Thinking of not voting this time out? Smith’s handy owner’s manual to the democratic process removes any excuse for not showing up at the ballot box.
The author hails from small-town Texas and lives in New York City, places respectively conservative and liberal but that she characterizes as equally fearing “that their wants and needs will be ignored if their candidate doesn’t win,” which of course is no way to run a representative democracy. Neither is the steady decline of voting. As Smith notes, every generation votes in fewer numbers than the one preceding it, and minority voters turn up at the polls in fewer numbers, proportionally, than white voters. There’s irony to such disparities given the long battle to secure voting rights for minorities. The author reminds us that a white woman born in 1900 would have been allowed to vote at age 21 while “an African American born at the turn of the 20th century and living in the South may not have cast a ballot on Election Day until she was 65 years old.” Smith serves up a youth-friendly—though by no means youth-restricted—guide to understanding not only one’s rights as a voter, but also such thorny constructs as how polls work (badly, too often) and how gerrymandering keeps districts that should go to one party going to the other instead. Usefully, she provides a timeline of what to do not just to vote, but to bring one’s cohort along for the ride: First thing is to register to vote, then “choose five friends to join you to vote.” Then, 40 and 30 and 10 days before the election, be sure those friends know how to vote, whether in person or by mail, where the polling place is, and other such practical matters.
Intelligent, spirited, and especially valuable to budding activists and first-time voters.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293482-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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