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
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech’s medical school, and it’s his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man’s troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skill—he has a talented diagnostician’s observant eye and a gift for description—but also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David’s story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017405-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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