An insightful look at contemporary America.
On road trips across the country, two friends confront their deeply held beliefs.
Making their book debut, former Marine Blashek, now an investor in New York City, and Haugh, a journalist who was an intern in the Obama White House and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, recount the evolution of their friendship, and their views about America, as they traveled to 44 states over the course of three years. The authors met at Yale Law School, and though they thought one another interesting and sympathetic, they found themselves frustratingly enmeshed in “suffocating ideological debates, politics, and the drawing of lines.” Blashek, a Republican, was quick to defend Donald Trump from attacks, suspicious of Haugh’s liberal stance. Haugh, raised by an activist single mother in Berkeley, “had grown up among protests.” While Blashek believed that Trump’s policy on immigration stemmed from a commitment to protect Americans from criminals, Haugh insisted that Trump was racist and, moreover, stoked racism among his followers. “Disagreements lingered,” the authors write, growing “deeper and more painful” as their arguments intensified. In 2017, with their plans for the future in flux, they decided to set off in search of the nation they felt they hardly knew. Their travels took them to a Trump rally in Phoenix, one week after the Charlottesville incident, where, to their surprise, Trump delivered “a script of unity and hope.” Despite protestors and heavily armed militiamen, they witnessed people engaged in passionate—but respectful—argument, unlike the conflicts reported by the media. “They were actually listening to one another,” the authors note. As they traveled, discovering communities bound by “a deep reservoir of social capital,” they learned that “finding common ground wasn’t about getting to agreement. It was about getting to the point where disagreement didn’t matter as much.” Both men, genial guides, ended their travels with a sense of hope about “how [things] could be if we act together to make it so.”
An insightful look at contemporary America.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-42379-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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