A dynamic chorus of voices leading the way in bolstering a true democracy.
Black women leaders demonstrate how we can create “an inclusive and multiracial democracy.”
Echoing Fannie Lou Hamer’s call to “wake up” to the urgency of addressing the unfinished business of “building democracy,” Blain, author of Until I Am Free and Set the World on Fire, brings together an impressive roster of Black women to discuss some of the most divisive issues facing us today. Among other topics, the contributors address reproductive and voting rights, racial equity in health care, equal pay, economic justice, and disability and LGBTQ+ rights. In the introduction, Blain astutely notes that Black women, having historically endured the most brutal deprivation of citizenship and human rights, “are uniquely positioned to combat injustices in our society.” They’re also the most dedicated voting bloc in America today. In the first part of the book, Laphonza Butler, former president of EMILYs List, recently appointed as California senator after the death of Dianne Feinstein, writes about how the devastating rollback of Roe v. Wade in 2022 should only reenergize the movement to elect pro-choice women to public office. Raquel Willis movingly argues that despite increased visibility and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, the voices of trans people continue to be sidelined. In the second part, “Building Power,” Dr. Rhea Boyd weighs in on racial inequity in the broken American health care system, and Donna Brazile discusses what she is known for as a Democratic strategist: breaking through sexist barriers to initiate “coalition building.” In the final section, “Combating Hate,” contributors take on the systematic and often violent indignities that still confront Black Americans. Dr. Jacqui Lewis writes eloquently about the Zulu concept of ubuntu, or the fierce sense of humanity that binds us all. Most contributors offer a historical context and specific strategies for moving forward.
A dynamic chorus of voices leading the way in bolstering a true democracy.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781324065609
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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