A simple but persuasive presentation that encourages thoughtful reflection.
A collection of photographs that challenges cultural stereotypes of Indigenous people of Canada.
Canadian First Nations artist Adams has personally witnessed the stigma and ignorance that her country’s Indigenous people face daily. During her long, successful career, she’s worked in a wide variety of different media, including video, paint, ceramics, and beads. But in this anti-racism project, she felt that no other medium but photography could capture the raw, intense emotions that played across her First Nations subjects’ faces. By placing two stark, black-and white photos of each subject side by side, Adams effectively forces viewers to reconsider their assumptions, resulting in powerful shifts in perception. In the first photo, the subject was told to pose how they believe other people perceive them, and in the second, they presented themselves how they wanted to be seen. For example, readers see a portrait of a serious-looking woman, and, above her, are the words “Welfare Mom?” Then, just below that term, readers are reminded to “look again.” The second image shows the same woman, radiant and smiling, with words that describe who she is, including “Mother,” “poet,” “activist,” and “Bannock Lady” (bannock is a kind of quick bread). Each subject described themselves in their own words, which offers readers striking insights into their lives. The art project was so successful that, in 2015, a campaign was launched to stage the portraits across Winnipeg, Manitoba; the faces were then seen on buses and billboards across the city. In this beautifully understated collection, the images are preserved in book form, which readers may use as a tool to combat discrimination. In the foreword, Canadian poet Katherena Vermette, who is of Métis descent, sums up the book’s spirit: “it’s about looking again, looking deeper, and to me, it’s also about kindness.” Indeed, the potential lasting impact of this collection can’t be underestimated; this is socially engaged art at its best.
A simple but persuasive presentation that encourages thoughtful reflection.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-55379-786-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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