by Margaret Peacock & Erik L. Peterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2022
An urgent, timely call for national reckoning.
A real-time document of a year of calamity.
University of Alabama professors Peacock, a historian of propaganda and the media, and Peterson, a historian of medicine and science, each kept copious notes during the daily chaos of 2020, tracking “hundreds of news stories, reports, tweets, posts, blogs, speeches, and videos from across the political spectrum.” Presenting those notes as a day-by-day journal, they have captured vividly “how people encountered these moments and what historical factors informed their understandings of the events unfolding around them.” Beginning on Jan. 1, when they report the alarmed findings of a global disease tracker about a viral outbreak in Wuhan, the authors convey the “messy immediacy” of a year marked by disease, disinformation, and violence. Central to their observations was the increasing threat of Covid-19, complicated by Trump administration policies, dysfunctional government, and “stark, intractable” political partisanship. “It’s a hoax, the Democrats have politicized it, Bill Gates is profiting from it, it’s a Chinese weapon,” social media posts proclaimed on Feb. 29, after the first American died. By March 26, the U.S had become the center of the pandemic even as a debate pitching public health measures against individual freedoms intensified. The pandemic was only one among many other traumas, including the opioid epidemic, lack of affordable housing, the ravages of climate change, and systemic racism. The killing of George Floyd in May and the protests that followed underscored the racial and economic inequality roiling the nation. Summing up their chronicle of chaos, the authors point to three factors that “made America sicker than we should have been in 2020: (a) entrenched racial hierarchies; (b) an economic structure dependent on individual accumulation of wealth and widespread consumption of ephemeral goods and entertainment; (c) distraction, cognitive dissonance, and an intentional historical amnesia that prevented the majority of comfortable, well-intentioned, middle-class, white Americans like ourselves from doing anything about the first two issues.”
An urgent, timely call for national reckoning.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4029-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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 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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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
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