A be-nicer-to-each-other program that’s worth considering though unlikely to take shape in a time of growing division.
The former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate urges readers to get their own houses in order.
It’s nice to be nice, and even if the man to whom Kasich lost the 2016 primary isn’t very nice, he counsels “that we shouldn’t be investing all of our emotions in that one office in the White House.” Quoting the likes of the Who and the Kings of Leon, he reckons that it’s up to us to change the world in smaller ways, telling uplifting stories “that remind us that everything we do accrues to the good—and, inversely, that everything we don’t do lines up against us.” That is, assuming that what we do is do good in the first place, such as the young woman who, in the absence of the person employed to do the job, donned a Chuck E. Cheese costume to save the day for a young man on the spectrum who would otherwise have been shattered by a missed hug. Kasich proffers a list of 10 principles, and, within the chapters devoted to them, he sometimes offers surprises, as when he defends Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee “as a way to call attention to racial justice and oppression.” Many of Kasich’s homilies are rather pointedly Christian, but by way of Mr. Rogers and not Franklin Graham: “We need to care for each other, love each other…acknowledge each other.” We also must “get out of our silo” and start listening to each other’s points of view, quizzing our sources of news in the same way that we would test the claims of a used-car salesman, said occupation being perhaps the only one held in less esteem than that of a politician. There’s nothing objectionable about the author’s 10-point program, though some farther to the right than he might not be happy with all of his examples.
A be-nicer-to-each-other program that’s worth considering though unlikely to take shape in a time of growing division.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-01220-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
