A short, direct, crystal-clear, and urgent call to action certain to get a blast from the NRA.
An outspoken and highly visible anti-gun activist presents his proposals for turning the United States into a country where guns are scarce and only responsible people are allowed to own them.
Volsky (co-author: Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, 2009), the co-founder and executive director of Guns Down America, takes aim at the National Rifle Association. The NRA, he charges, is directly focused on helping the gun industry sell more guns since more gun sales means more money for the gun lobby and more power in government. It does this, he reports, by telling Americans that they must fear being killed every day and the only way to protect themselves is to own a gun. The narrative brings together the author’s personal experiences at a firearms training institute, interviews with gun owners, stories of mass shootings, and a raft of statistics about gun ownership and gun deaths. Volsky provides background on the Second Amendment, the history of the NRA, and how other countries regulate gun ownership. All this leads up to what the author calls his New Second Amendment Compact, a 10-point plan that protects the right to bear arms but also empowers citizens and the government to regulate that right. The compact takes aim at gun manufacturers and dealers and calls for expanding regulations, ending open carry, requiring licensing and insurance, providing incentives for people to give up their guns, and funding scientific research on ending gun violence. In subsequent chapters, the author elaborates on the compact’s main points. Viewing the effectiveness of grassroots social movements, such as the fight for LGBTQ equality, Volsky is optimistic that the demographic trends in the country indicate that support for his ideas will grow. To aid those interested in joining his movement, he has included a tip-filled appendix, “How to Talk to Gun People and Win.”
A short, direct, crystal-clear, and urgent call to action certain to get a blast from the NRA.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-319-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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 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
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