A meandering exploration of racial attitudes and oppression.
Memoir, family stories, and American history intertwine in this debut book.
In 1883, the U.S. government gave Tyler’s great-grandfather a plot of land. As a white man, he worked the tract freely, and subsequent generations prospered from his successful wheat farm. In contrast, the author’s African-American husband, William, had enslaved ancestors. His family remained poor. Spanning 1865 to 2015, Tyler’s voluminous racial analysis alternates between American history tidbits and personal “privileged white versus poor black” family tales in an effort to link William’s drug addiction and incarceration to systematic racism. Offering black-and-white photos and referencing a wide variety of book and internet sources, the work presents slave narratives, quotes from African-American scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, and declarations about turn-of-the-century rural families (“White farming families in the South didn’t need their children to help in the fields, they had black people toiling on their behalf instead”). The book also covers such diverse topics as schooling, the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration, World War I draft registration in the South, the Depression, live-in domestics, black-owned businesses, the GI Bill, white mob violence, and 1950s youth culture (“Elvis crafted impersonations of black culture and was not ashamed to proclaim the roots of his persona”). In the work’s first part, Tyler smoothly presents compelling family accounts and illuminating portions of black history. But the narrative rambles in the second half when the author proceeds to dissect her own racist attitudes while sprinkling in some annoying anecdotes. For example, Tyler, a “good white person,” wanted to spend time suffering to learn more about race, so she entered a homeless shelter, thrilled that her roommate was a black woman. After 20 minutes, she “grabbed her Ann Taylor suit” and left to check into a hotel. Recalling episodes from her life as a privileged white woman—she moves into a black neighborhood; she has a black child with a felon; she feels uncomfortable talking to black moms—Tyler turns the spotlight away from African-Americans and shines it on herself.
A meandering exploration of racial attitudes and oppression.Pub Date: June 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4997-5527-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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