A bracing and thought-provoking study of race and class clashes in American history.
Jeter, a former Washington Postforeign correspondent, examines the fraught history of race and class in America.
“What is to be done now,” asks the author, “as the country disintegrates into political chaos and those of us who are fully awake wait anxiously for the rest of the nation to join us in reclaiming this land from the bloodsucking capitalists who have robbed us blind?” In these pages, Jeter presents readers with a far-ranging survey of American history to trace tangled and interconnected stories of race and class relations going back to before the U.S. Civil War. The author refers to his project as “a journey through time” undertaken to “assess what has been wrought by this ferocious, 150-year class war between the Americans who built the country and those who own it.” Focusing on racial issues, Jeter looks at incidents such as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which “white supremacists overthrew the progressive, interracial government on the pretext of Black male predation despite a lack of any evidence.” On the labor relations side, he walks readers through events like President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 signing of the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of employees to bargain collectively with their employers, which, among other things, was a signpost moment in the long “antagonistic relationship” between the American Federation of Labor and Black American workers.
Jeter’s narrative skill is remarkable; he writes with both passion and clarity about the ways “the white settler elite has historically deployed…false accusations to stir up murderous passions, creating a smokescreen for dispossession.” The picture he paints of America’s ruling capitalist oligarchy constantly pitting workers against each other along racial lines is vigorously convincing, even when he lapses into over-generalizations: “White workers typically respond to financial uncertainly by abandoning the class struggle to instead punch down on African Americans, who they invariably see as a threat to their racial identity and the privileges afforded to it.” His narrative’s main weakness is its sprawl, which blunts its focus. The book bounces all over the last 150 years, from the death of Ethel Rosenberg to the murder of Emmett Till to the Korean War to the Montgomery bus boycott to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling to President Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof—Jeter even makes a detour to discuss a dispute he had with an acquaintance over a personal loan he was late in repaying. The author manages to draw connecting threads between most of these subjects, but the sheer number of data points may leave some readers yearning for more focus. Still, the power of Jeter’s insights is consistently stunning, and his rhetoric is often thrillingly sharp, as when he describes “Black respectability politics increasingly promoted by an African American bourgeoisie that, however well-meaning, operated from a misguided understanding of Black laborers as a defeated people whose best chance was to obey white folks and hope for the best.” All of these insights are enlisted in the cause of exposing the “the gaping spiritual wound left by a battery of invectives, bullying, and profiling.”
A bracing and thought-provoking study of race and class clashes in American history.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Drum Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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