Passion and anger fuel a biting critique.
Emotionally raw essays focus on racism, sexism, and manhood.
In a collection of previously published essays, journalist, activist, blogger, and podcast host Powell (The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood, 2016, etc.) writes with urgency and outrage about his identity as a black American. “To be Black in America is to live a sort of death every single day of your life,” he writes. “It makes for a stressful, paranoid, and schizophrenic existence: Am I an American, or am I not?” The author grew up in the slums of Jersey City, raised by a single mother who struggled to support them on meager wages and government assistance. When he was 8, his father, whom he had seen only a few times, refused to help financially, claiming that Kevin was not his son. Powell was besieged by images of men engaged in “toxic behavior,” with no role models to help him understand “that manhood is not, in fact, power, privilege, sex, rock and roll, hip-hop, violence, ego gone wild, material things, money, any of that. That manhood should be about love, peace, non-violence, [and] respecting women as our equals.” The theme of manhood recurs in many essays—about Jay-Z, Tupac Shakur, O.J. Simpson, Harvey Weinstein, and Barack Obama, among others—in which Powell regrets the legacy of “patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, violence,” and hatred that characterized his relationships with women before therapy, education, and spirituality helped him to figure out “how to be a man who is not a human lethal weapon, to self, to others.” Toxic manhood and endemic racism have blighted him, causing “internal wars around self-esteem, staggering bouts with sadness, with depression,” and a feeling of “tremendous emptiness.” Internalized racism “becomes Black self-hatred, Black abuse” and also generates a “Black elite, the Black gatekeepers,” quick to pass judgment on poor blacks. Although racism continues unabated, Powell admits that he has “limitless hope” that efforts of America’s young people will change the world.
Passion and anger fuel a biting critique.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9880-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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