From Massachusetts and Florida to Montana and Alaska, with each chapter, both conservative and liberal readers will react...
Krebs (538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal, 2010) seeks to paint a portrait of liberals living among the enemy, as it were, by choice.
As a campaign director for MoveOn.org and founder of Living Liberally, a national network of political social clubs, the author writes knowledgeably about people across the country—in Waukesha, Wisconsin; Little Elm, Texas; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Pawleys Island, South Carolina; Pomeroy, Iowa; and elsewhere—who have chosen to stay in a politically unwelcoming environment for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s home, where they were raised. For others, they state that it’s not so bad and that there are residents who, like them, think liberally but keep quiet about it. Many stay because moving to a big city, college, or coastal town is too much like giving up; plus, there’s no challenge there. The author proclaims that equating churches with conservatism is as wrong as equating atheists with liberalism. Furthermore, there are radicals in every way of thought, and liberalism is not immune. Some liberals quietly listen but stand up when called for, giving to and taking part in their communities. Others live provocatively, with bumper stickers and lawn signs for elections, always ready to jump into the fight. The majority love where they live, and they count on their neighbors and return the favor. One woman said her town was a great place to live; it just had no health care, maintained infrastructure, or working educational system. Another mentions that many of the residents think that the recycling program is a socialist plot. Throughout, Krebs approaches his subjects with candor and respect.
From Massachusetts and Florida to Montana and Alaska, with each chapter, both conservative and liberal readers will react strongly, but most will do nothing about it. Hopefully, however, the book will spur discussion and civic action.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59558-972-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
