A powerful, well-researched indictment of racist media in the United States.
A scholar explores the role of the media in perpetuating systemic racism in this nonfiction book.
“Overly employed culturally racist stereotypes of Blackness,” Gammage writes in the book’s introduction, erroneously place "the burden of health and life disparities” on Black women. Reality television, she argues, with ample examples at her disposal, too often presents Black women as violent and threatening and feeds into narratives popular among white audiences that Black women “are chronically unhealthy and in need of social control.” This racist imagery, she convincingly notes, draws on a long history of the media’s racism, the origins of which can be traced back 500 years to the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. Whether it’s newspapers and print advertisements of the colonial era or the television and social media of today, “racially abusive media” has long shaped and reflected institutionalized systems of racial subjugation. As evidenced by the nearly 20-page bibliography, not only does Gammage have a firm command of the relevant scholarly literature on media studies—the topic of her first book, Representations of Black Women in the Media: The Damnation of Black Womanhood(2015)—but also on the history of Black health care. From enslavers who believed Black women faked illness to avoid work to television images of “crack mamas,” racist stereotypes of Black women in the media have played a key role in denying equitable access to medical care. While much of the book surveys the sordid arena of racist imagery, the final chapter examines the ways Black women in contemporary society have co-opted social media as a tool for empowerment “that celebrates Black pride, beauty, resistance, and resilience.” A professor and chair of Africana studies at California State University Northridge, Gammage expertly blends her erudite analysis with an engaging writing style that avoids academic jargon. This emphasis on accessibility is complemented by an ample assortment of tables, graphs, charts, and other visual aids that provide an abundance of data that supports her arguments regarding racism in the media and health disparities among Black women.
A powerful, well-researched indictment of racist media in the United States.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781942774075
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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