Perceptive, informative, and certainly timely, albeit a tad hagiographic.
Noted African-American scholar and Baptist minister Dyson (I May Not Get There With You, 2000, etc.), in keeping with the current reappraisal of hip-hop and rap, offers provocative insights into the life and milieu of the artist he calls a “ghetto saint.”
In a lengthy preface, Dyson details how his interview with rapper Big Tray Dee (the artist broke down in tears after talking about Tupac) became for him a metaphor of the “agony many have over the loss of Tupac’s gift . . . that nevertheless continues to speak to millions around the globe.” In four sections (“Childhood Chains,” “Adolescent Aspiration,” “Portraits of an Artist,” and “Bodies and Beliefs”), Dyson attempts to understand, with the help of those who knew Tupac and also of critics like Stanley Crouch, the man who symbolized the best and worst of rap. To start, Dyson explores Tupac’s troubled childhood: his mother was a former Black Panther as well as crack addict, which meant that, though he absorbed her revolutionary ideals, he saw the Black Panthers as a practical attempt to “answer racial oppression.”her drug habit made for an impoverished and unstable childhood. In the second section he assesses Tupac’s role as an artist, who not only read widely (Sartre, Walker, and Orwell) but, understanding the reality of inner-city life—its thug culture, its hopelessness—wrote stirring raps that changed people’s’ lives. The last section analyzes the crude sexist language of many raps, Tupac’s own conflicted attitude toward women, and his spiritual beliefs—“an ongoing argument” with God as the performer both rejected and embraced suffering. Though critical of his treatment of women and of his drug-taking, Dyson notes approvingly how in death Tupac has become a posthumous icon as well as an urban legend, serving “the psychic and cultural needs of poor black youth.”
Perceptive, informative, and certainly timely, albeit a tad hagiographic.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-01755-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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.
Atlanticsenior 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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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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