A carefully written investigation full of villains—and the occasional hero.
Fast-paced though complex account of ethnic collision among the fisheries of Gulf Coast Texas.
“This is a book about a racist backlash against refugees fleeing a ruinous war,” writes Johnson, author of The Feather Thief, to open a narrative that pits Vietnamese newcomers to East Texas against an array of enemies, most dangerously the KKK. When the Vietnamese arrived, they found few friends among the White fishermen of Galveston Bay, who were happy to sell those newcomers junk boats and machinery at exorbitant prices, as with one who “grinned at a reporter while describing the time he sold a boat to a Vietnamese shrimper for $25,000, even though he knew it was decrepit.” Meanwhile, Johnson notes, a Gallup poll soon after the fall of Saigon “showed only 36 percent of Americans believed refugees fleeing the calamitous war of their country’s own making deserved resettlement,” lending weight to the hostility on a homefront suddenly populated by a wave of 130,000 Vietnamese. One Anglo fisherman bought into the widely circulated lie that among the refugees were Viet Cong agents bent on destroying America, and he began terrorizing two young brothers in “Gook City,” one of whom killed their tormentor. Amazingly, he was acquitted by an all-White jury on the grounds of self-defense, which only lent energy to KKK members from far afield who came to chase the Vietnamese out. In another kind of radicalism, a Taiwanese manufacturer that had been dumping toxic chemicals into the bay, poisoning the fishery, met local resistance that included both Anglos and Vietnamese. In the end, the KKK dwindled away, but “the White supremacist movement charged ahead.” Even though most shrimp consumed here is imported, Johnson observes that the domestic crop is largely brought to market by Vietnamese fishermen. His fascinating and disturbing narrative is a winning mix of biography, true crime, and ecological study.
A carefully written investigation full of villains—and the occasional hero.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984880-12-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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