by Luke Mogelson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2022
Essential for understanding the right-wing rage that boils across America.
A war correspondent provides a crucial account of the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
“While they demonstrated their ability to attempt an insurrection…I have a hard time crediting them with the imagination necessary to conceive of one,” writes Mogelson, New Yorker staffer and winner of two National Magazine and two George Polk Awards, referring to the Proud Boys and other right-wing radicals who stormed the Capitol. The orders for that insurrection came from elsewhere, as a congressional investigation is now unveiling. Mogelson examines the uprising as the expression of a kind of free-floating White rage that he has been tracing over the last few years. His reporting has taken him to places such as Michigan, where, in 2020, thousands of Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, and other dissidents attempted to shut down the state capitol while others plotted to kidnap and perhaps even kill the state’s Democratic governor, who “had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation.” The Covid-19 pandemic was one spark, along with “a raging blizzard of propaganda [that] would completely blot out reality.” The reality that Mogelson presents is unrelentingly bleak, culminating in a vivid, and frightening, blow-by-blow account of the assault on the Capitol, which he witnessed firsthand. By not declaring himself a member of the press, he was able to move among figures such as the so-called QAnon Shaman, “who was carrying out a highly specific and consequential mission, from which he would not be deterred”—namely, to reclaim the Capitol for God by bellowing “shamanic songs” to activate the electromagnetic ley lines along which D.C. was supposedly built. (His mission ultimately ended in a sentence of 41 months in prison.) Other participants were much less woo-woo, of course, earnest in their mission to overturn the election and, in the bargain, hang Mike Pence for upholding the Constitution. Mogelson recounts the chaos in consistently striking, memorable detail.
Essential for understanding the right-wing rage that boils across America.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48921-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
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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More In The Series
by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
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