A pleasantly discursive and anecdotally informative light meditation on the ``profound, almost magical, but often unacknowledged significance'' of names. The husband-and-wife team of biographer Kaplan (Walt Whitman: A Life, 1980, etc.) and novelist Bernays (Professor Romeo, 1989, etc.) canvass the importance of naming, from Adam's labeling of creation to the artificially concocted trademarks of the contemporary Namelab, a San Francicobased company that came up with product tags like ``Acura'' and ``Compaq.'' Although naming is a universal phenomenon, the authors concentrate on North America, where there has been historically more room for innovation and confusion. The colorful, odd, or startling names given many of the nation's localities are as diverse as the more problematic renamings of its immigrant population. For example, the curiously named Judge Learned Hand opined in the case of the Selwyn film company against Samuel Goldfish (a.k.a. Schmuel Gelbfisz) that ``a self-made man may prefer a self-made name,'' and allowed the defendant to call himself Samuel Goldwyn. The cultural and transliterative difficulties of Eastern Europeans seem almost negligible when compared to those of African-Americans (or blacks, Negroes, etc.), who wrestle with the dilemma of established ``slave'' names as opposed to adoptive pan-African patronymics. Changing names is almost mandatory in some professions, especially the film industry, where Gladys Smith became Mary Pickford. In the literary world, authors like Dickens (first called Boz) and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) took as much trouble with their noms de plume as with their characters. While they deftly sample a smorgasbord of nomenclature, the authors are slightly less adept in extracting significance, such as psychological meanings and social usages, from the matter of naming. But unpacking what's in a name, especially in America, makes for an inexhaustible and entertaining subject for Kaplan and Bernays.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80741-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism.
In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a “white supremacist country.” The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as “one of the most defining forces” in her life. Throughout the book, Oluo responds to questions that she has often been asked, and others that she wishes were asked, about racism “in our workplace, our government, our homes, and ourselves.” “Is it really about race?” she is asked by whites who insist that class is a greater source of oppression. “Is police brutality really about race?” “What is cultural appropriation?” and “What is the model minority myth?” Her sharp, no-nonsense answers include talking points for both blacks and whites. She explains, for example, “when somebody asks you to ‘check your privilege’ they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing.” She unpacks the complicated term “intersectionality”: the idea that social justice must consider “a myriad of identities—our gender, class, race, sexuality, and so much more—that inform our experiences in life.” She asks whites to realize that when people of color talk about systemic racism, “they are opening up all of that pain and fear and anger to you” and are asking that they be heard. After devoting most of the book to talking, Oluo finishes with a chapter on action and its urgency. Action includes pressing for reform in schools, unions, and local governments; boycotting businesses that exploit people of color; contributing money to social justice organizations; and, most of all, voting for candidates who make “diversity, inclusion and racial justice a priority.”
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58005-677-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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