Syndicated Miami Herald columnist Pitts offers a thoroughly absorbing study of the African-American man’s struggle to become a competent father in a society sorely lacking in role models. Detailing his personal efforts to bond with his children, the author also presents numerous case studies of black men facing similar difficulties. Sons of abusive or absent men, many members of the younger generation have to pave their way to productive fatherhood over rough terrain, while exorcising their progenitors— ghosts. As Pitts details, with 64 percent of African-American children growing up in single-parent homes, often raised by poor mothers, black youth, especially males, are at greater risk for delinquency. Lacking male role models that provide love or discipline, insecure black youth often feel abandoned and adopt the tough bravado of street culture. Interviewing black males, Pitts encounters too many who have abdicated all the responsibilities of fatherhood; some aren—t even sure how many children they have. Blaming racism for their predicament, as valid as that may be, in Pitts’s view only perpetuates the cycle of black men who grew up without fathers begetting children who grow up in single-parent homes. Pitts offers helpful, sensible advice. He urges black men who have fathered children to locate them and establish a relationship with them and their mothers. Once they establish that relationship, he says, they should not try to buy kids— love but instead create structure and stability while praising them, allowing the next generation to grow up confident. Fathers must also make the children understand the importance of education, says Pitts; this is especially important in a society “that touts the notion that authentic blackness precludes academic excellence.” A readable, well-balanced, impassioned account of a dilemma that touches not just the black family, but all who care about children. ($100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56352-501-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Longstreet
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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