Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.
Why humans need to tell new stories.
Literary scholar Gottschall, who celebrated humans’ propensity for telling tales in The Storytelling Animal, now considers ways stories “sway us for the worse.” Why, he asks, thinking of conspiracy stories (which are not, he insists, theories), climate change deniers, and news stories that produce feelings of despair, “do stories seem to be driving our species mad?” Given the ubiquity of stories in every culture and their potential to create conflict, he focuses his thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: “How can we save the world from stories?” Drawing on philosophy (Plato is a recurring figure), psychology, anthropology, neurobiology, history, and literature and interweaving personal anecdotes and snippets of popular culture, Gottschall acknowledges that stories have powerful emotional impact. From ancient times, they emerged “as a tool of tribal cohesion and competition,” structured with a “universal grammar” that is “paranoid and vindictive”: Characters try to solve predicaments, facing trouble and often a clearly defined villain. Such stories generate empathy for the characters in peril while creating a kind of “moral blindness” regarding villains. This paradigm, Gottschall argues, shapes our stories about society, politics, and even history, “a genre of speculative narrative that projects our current obsessions onto the past.” Rather than depict Nazis or White supremacists as villains, Gottschall suggests that they were not “worse people than us” but had the “moral misfortune” of being born into cultures which mistakenly defined bad as good. When we villainize, he warns, we dehumanize, sinking into sanctimony and hate. With “folk tales” erupting and spreading “with incredible speed and ease on the internet” and with a political figure he dubs the Big Blare reigning as a supreme storyteller, Gottschall exhorts readers to become aware of storytelling biases and to learn to tell a story “where we are protagonists on the same quest.”
Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4596-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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