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SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK ON ISLAM

Name: SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK ON ISLAM
Author: Giacomo Latta
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1551-4

by Giacomo Latta ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 20, 2017

Unconvincing arguments about Islam and the Quran.

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Latta presents his wide-ranging thoughts on the Quran in this debut book.

The author begins by calling into question the very notion of hate speech and Islamophobia. He posits that it’s the Western media that are truly afraid of Islam—and with good reason. For the author, supporters of Islam are “misogynistic, slavery-loving, sex-obsessed halfwits.” He believes that “the West, out of a pure need for self-preservation among other things, must banish Islam.” He discusses the misogyny he finds in the Quran, citing verses pertaining to men’s domination over women and the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife for Muslim men. Latta describes that promise as “land-grabber” Muhammad’s recruitment strategy for his conquest of the “sociopathic, uneducated part of the world.” The author sidesteps many arguments about similarities between the Old Testament and the Quran by asserting that Muhammad stole and corrupted ideas from the Bible, an inherently better book because Christian fundamentalists do not bomb their own “left, right, and centre.” No actual research into ancient texts is supplied, but Latta does provide quotes from an unnamed, personal blog that, for him, proves democracy and Islam are incompatible. The only things that the author seems to hate more than the Quran are the immigration and multicultural policies of Canada, his home country. He offers several vague, anecdotal stories about Canadian immigrants to illustrate these points. (As a former soccer player, Latta himself has “witnessed the behaviour of all sorts of other ethnic…groups.”) His concluding chapters call for an all-out war against Islam. In his passionate book, the author provides some thought-provoking assertions, including that the politically correct culture has made Westerners blind and unwilling to confront the unsettling aspects of Islam’s fundamental text—a controversial yet intriguing contention worth exploring. But Latta’s attempts at brash, tell-it-like-it-is humor create a cruel and rambling voice that spews outlandish and unsupported assumptions. He compares Muslims to neo-Nazis, although he seems to show a bit more sympathy for the latter group when discussing slavery: “Even neo-Nazis are focused on sending blacks back to where they came….This means, of course, even they are not in favour of slavery. You cannot control a slave when he is on another continent.” Ultimately, his arguments are unpersuasive and will likely appeal only to like-minded readers.

Unconvincing arguments about Islam and the Quran.

Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5255-1551-4

Page Count: 156

Publisher: FriesenPress

Review Posted Online: March 27, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PEOPLE
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

- BOOK REVIEW
NEW NEWS OUT OF AFRICA
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.