A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.
Hagopian, a veteran educator, outlines the assault on antiracist curricula in this nonfiction work.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, James Whitfield—the first Black principal to serve at Texas’ Colleyville Heritage High School—penned a thoughtful email criticizing systemic racism and calling for his community to unite against ignorance and hate. While the message was embraced by many, it drew the ire of a local, unsuccessful candidate for the school board, who then launched a campaign that painted Whitfield as a left-wing radical hellbent on indoctrinating students. The campaign worked, and Whitfield would shortly thereafter be suspended, and later let go, from his position. This book highlights the stories of educators like Whitfield, who bravely defy pressure to remain quiet on issues of racism, while surveying state and national efforts to censor educators attempting to teach Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ histories endorsed by a consensus within the scholarly community. These “truthcrime” laws, a term coined by the author, ban “divisive concepts” and other vague categories that target marginalized histories. Promotors of “uncritical race theory,” per Hagopian, emphasize historical and contemporary narratives that deemphasize racism “as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias” as they reject institutional analyses that point to systemic power imbalances. The author provides a compelling account of how a politically and economically powerful minority have been able to enact book bans and curriculum censorship. He also celebrates individual educators like Whitfield who have stood up for antiracist educational practices despite public bullying campaigns against them. In so doing, the author highlights strategies other educators can use in “truth teaching,” such as encouraging critical thinking skills that prompt students to view sources from a myriad of perspectives. An educator with more than two decades of experience in public schools, Hagopian is the editor or co-editor of multiple books on education and social justice. The text’s inspirational anecdotes spotlighting teachers who have defied public pressure to teach antiracist lessons are undergirded by the author’s solid foundation in pedagogical best practices and supported by more than 500 research endnotes.
A well-researched case promoting the value of antiracist education.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798888902950
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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