by Jane Rhodes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007
Good reading for the Baudrillard set—and for students of ’60s politics generally.
Scary radicals par excellence, the Black Panthers took pains to set the terms of their depiction in the media and popular culture—and apart from Forrest Gump, they were largely successful.
So notes Rhodes (American Studies/Macalester College) in this study of the shaping of the Panther image and icon. The N-word–charged scene in which Panthers shake down poor Tom Hanks notwithstanding—a scene that is “little more than a contrivance to highlight Gump’s innocence against the backdrop of such inflammatory rhetoric”—and the Panthers’ depiction of the media as lackeys of the ruling class and therefore enemies, the party was concerned to cultivate a heroic, positive image, at once defiant and statesmanlike. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, for instance, were careful to instruct the “pigs” that any attempt to crack down on their fellow Panthers or the black Bay Area neighborhoods in which they operated would be met with violence, insisting that their stance was defensive. The party was little known outside the Bay Area at first, but local sympathies were translated at a national level. Icons piled on icons—Rhodes notes that the famed photo of Newton seated with a shotgun in one hand and spear in the other went against his contempt for “black cultural nationalists’ embrace of African symbols,” but it made good suitable-for-framing revolutionary art all the same, picked up by the most mainstream of media. Most of Rhodes’s referents will be familiar to anyone who was present at the time, and her narrative seldom picks up above a scholarly trudge, but she does her readers a good turn by extending the Panther story to the present—for, as she reminds us, there are still old Panthers doing good deeds in the black community, even as Islamist “New Panthers” attempt to appropriate the old icons and images for their own causes.
Good reading for the Baudrillard set—and for students of ’60s politics generally.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56584-961-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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