While Jen’s findings are undoubtedly intriguing, she is not fully convincing in her portrayal of the modest, hardworking...
A Chinese-American novelist and essayist investigates how culture shapes identity.
Award-winning writer Jen (Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Independent Self, 2013, etc.) continues the inquiry of her last nonfiction book, in which she examined differences in Eastern and Western writing and art. Here, drawing on abundant research from psychology and sociology, the author probes East-West distinctions in self-definition and community. These distinctions are so profound, she asserts, that they affect personal relationships, teaching, storytelling, architecture, and even “our ideas about law, rehabilitation, religion, freedom, and choice.” In the individualistic West, Jen argues, the self is “a kind of avocado, replete with a big pit on which it is focused.” In the collectivist East, the “flexi-self” is interdependent, “a context-focused self, oriented toward serving something larger than itself.” Whereas the big pit self believes that individual ability and drive lead to achievement, the flexi-self, Jen asserts, “starts with debt” to parents, teachers, and community. The flexi-self is more attuned to patterns than to “the strange and novel”; the Chinese, therefore, are not “divergent thinkers—thinkers who can easily generate novel uses for a brick, say, or a tree branch,” but rather can adapt others’ ideas to their own needs. Jen makes much of the Chinese college admission exam, in which students’ success is supported by the entire nation. Traffic noise is forbidden so as not to disturb the test-takers, and taxi drivers offer students free rides to the exam site. Yet despite the “self-sacrificing help” of parents and teachers, students are under extreme pressure to perform, since their entire future depends on admission to an elite college. In asserting that American schools “concentrate more on imagination and resourcefulness”—big pit traits—Jen ignores the competition for top nursery schools, emphasis on resume-building extracurricular activities, and intense test-prep tutoring that mark the experiences of many students.
While Jen’s findings are undoubtedly intriguing, she is not fully convincing in her portrayal of the modest, hardworking flexi-self and the big pit self “with high self-esteem and a lack of stick-to-it-ness.”Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94782-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
A fascinating analysis of white Americans' attitudes on race, by two political scientists who argue strenuously, though not entirely convincingly, that our leaders would be more effective in forging multiracial consensus and coalition to improve social and economic access for all citizens if they appealed to ``moral principles that reach beyond race.'' Conscious of contemporary Americans' growing cynicism about both race and public-opinion polls, Sniderman (Stanford Univ.) and Carmines (Indiana Univ.) devised techniques using computer-assisted public-opinion research to uncover attitudes among white respondents that might otherwise be obscured by self-conscious efforts to make their answers conform to ``politically correct'' standards. The good news is that the resulting findings document not only a definitive decrease in overt bigotry among whites, but also an increase in good will and positive attitudes toward blacks. Nonetheless, the data also show an overwhelming rejection of race-conscious policies like affirmative action—even among whites who display the most racially tolerant attitudes. In fact, Sniderman and Carmines offer data showing that resistance to policies like affirmative action is linked not to latent or persistent prejudice, as many assume, but rather to a sense of its violation of American ideals of justice. As Americans try to forge a new consensus in a racially polarized society, this is a useful lesson in the reality that matters besides race often shape people's response to racial issues. But there is also the paradoxical correlative—which the authors underplay to the detriment of their argument—that unexamined racial attitudes are also played out in every aspect of daily life. This monograph's exploration of undisclosed racial attitudes among whites is challenging, but the analysis and conclusions about how to pull a racially fragmented society together are less impressive. (26 line illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-674-14578-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
A masterful survey of the origins, development, nature, and decline of the trade in African men, women, and children, drawing heavily on original sources. Thomas (Conquest: Montezuma, CortÇs and the Fall of Old Mexico, 1994, etc.) argues that, while the practice of slavery was widespread in Europe even during the Middle Ages, it was the Portuguese, as their explorers began to establish trade in Africa in the 1440s, who turned an intermittent habit into a large and sophisticated business. Most other seafaring European nations- -including the Spanish, English, and Dutch—soon followed. Drawing heavily on journals, state documents, business ledgers, and memoirs, Thomas is able to trace in astonishing detail how the business was run, who financed it, and what their profits were, and to explain the complex and profitable interactions of merchants and governments in the trade. Because Thomas is so thorough, there are numbers of surprises here, including the details of the longstanding collaboration of some African rulers with the slave trade. It's also startling to discover that, according to Thomas, approximately one in every ten slave ships experienced a slave rebellion—and that a few were even successful. The sailors in the trade, Thomas notes, were treated horribly themselves: The mortality rate of Dutch crews, for instance, hovered at about 18 percent, while on average about 12 percent of the Africans being transported died at sea. While this is primarily an economic and political history, Thomas does not slight the suffering of the slaves, nor the widespread corrupting effect of the trade on the nations involved in it. He concludes with a vivid history of the long struggle of the abolitionists, beginning in the 18th century, to make the trade illegal. Grim but consistently gripping history, told with clarity and a meticulous attention to detail, this is likely to become the standard reference on the economics of the slave trade.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81063-8
Page Count: 760
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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