An uncompromising yet accessible rejoinder to conventional wisdom about race and violence in the U.S.
A sharp alternative history of Black responses to white supremacy.
Jackson, a professor of Africana studies and author of Force and Freedom, fuses solid research with an urgent authorial voice, bringing a fresh perspective to the haunted history of American race relations. “This entire book consists of examples of Black people refusing lies, violence, theft, mockery, or second-class citizenship,” she writes. “It shows how our refusal denies whiteness and white supremacy their power and unearned authority.” In five thematically interlaced chapters, Jackson encourages readers “to think outside the binary of violence and nonviolence.” She argues that self-defense must be understood along the spectrum of resistance, including force, communal protection, and refuge in rituals of flight and joy. She examines the simmering of liberationist thought, exemplified by the Haitian revolution’s aftermath and the abolitionist era. “The late 1850s were precarious times,” she writes. “Black and white leaders sensed a breaking point regarding the institution of slavery in America.” The author also explores “the powerful relationship between Black women and force in the face of anti-Black violence,” unearthing startling stories of self-defense against the backdrop of horrific flashpoints—e.g., during the “Red Summer” of 1919 and the 1957 Little Rock integration crisis. By the late 1950s, writes the author, “the overall mood of Black Americans across the South was that white violence had to be met with force.” Jackson astutely examines the temptations of migration or flight, “a constant refrain or remedy in African American history” because “leaving is a form of refusal...something Black people have done in response to white supremacy for centuries.” This taut and fiery discussion focuses on historical research (with occasional repetition) and transformative figures (often little known) along with hard-won insight from Jackson’s personal experiences.
An uncompromising yet accessible rejoinder to conventional wisdom about race and violence in the U.S.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781541602908
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
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