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
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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