A sobering, educative assessment of the changes that the pandemic has wrought on our world.
Hate that mask you have to wear to the store? Get used to it if you want to stay alive.
Ashton, chief medical correspondent for ABC News, dismisses the often heard refrain that one day things will get back to normal. Covid-19, she writes, has introduced an invisible, perhaps indomitable threat into our lives, and even if a vaccine is developed, it’s likely that it will have to be modified every year or two to take into account the mutations of the virus. Additionally, there are different levels of risk: If you’re of retirement age, a male, and a person of color, the odds are not in your favor; neither are they if you are overweight or have diabetes, high blood pressure, or some other chronic health condition. As the author shows, it’s up to each person to determine their health-risk quotient and make decisions such as whether to eat in restaurants. This quotient can be altered, of course. Making changes in diet to favor a low-sugar, low-carb regimen will help along with exercise, adequate sleep, and limiting alcohol intake. As for the rest: Flying is fairly safe, she writes, as long as you fly with an airline that blocks middle seats and “book a window seat to keep your distance from people moving up and down the aisle.” But stay away from gyms, which “have always been prime places for infectious illness.” Ashton sees “silver linings” in all the grim news, one of them being the dawning awareness that it’s up to us to improve our health and thus our chances for survival; another is a reordered sense of priorities. For the medical profession as a whole, she urges that “we need more health research on race,” and “we need to rethink the drug supply chain.”
A sobering, educative assessment of the changes that the pandemic has wrought on our world.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-308323-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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