Passion without form.
A zealous but unfocused invective by a talented writer yet to realize his own potential.
An African-American police officer in Kansas City, Kodiack’s topic is black crime. According to the author, Kansas City is 70% white, but 80% of the city’s crimes are committed by blacks. Kodiack is furious with fellow African-Americans for their unwillingness to stop this disparity and with whites and “blues” (police officers) for standing idly by. Much of his narrative takes the form of a rant deriding the confused priorities of blacks, and like most rants, this lacks the structure that might have given it more of a punch. Kodiack describes his project as being the result of “eight years of random dictations,” and this randomness is its downfall. A skilled writer, Kodiack nonetheless shifts between topics with head-spinning speed, letting his rage drive him and frequently leaving his reader in the dust. This is not to say that the author doesn’t make some good points. His assertion that African-Americans need to take up the cause of their own advancement is compelling, and his assault on the faux piety of political correctness is brash and believable. Further, in response to the problem of black crime, Kodiack proposes hard solutions, though their quality varies widely. Some–like better education and job training for prison inmates–are convincing and level-headed. But others–like the compulsory enlistment of unregenerate criminals into the military–are downright frightening in their potential ramifications. In addressing his subject, Kodiack uses a number of different writings styles, but the balance he strikes between formal prose and the argot of Kansas City streets is an uneasy one. In one instance, he deflates a well-crafted critique of his department’s pursuit policies by exclaiming, “Nigga, please!” Later, he calls local city-council members “retards.” Such descents into hateful speech blunt the force of his argument and open him to criticism.
Passion without form.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-46093-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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