A complex, disturbing, valuable tale of racial disharmony, government failure, and one man’s frantic attempts to save the...
An insider’s account of the “madness and mayhem” of the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and the nightmare confrontation between free speech and public safety that the clash created.
Signer (Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father, 2015, etc.) was mayor of the progressive college town when hundreds of armed, torch-carrying protesters arrived, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” ostensibly to protect a statue of Robert E. Lee from removal. Although he lacked power in his ceremonial position (the city manager was in charge), Signer felt compelled to act: He was Jewish, an expert on demagoguery, and teaching a university course on race, policy and history. With a doctorate in political science, the author was committed to deliberative government. In this deeply introspective book, which addresses Donald Trump’s fearmongering rise to the presidency, Signer explains how he was “pushing the boundaries” of his job, encouraging different perspectives on the statue issue and upsetting many staff with his seeming meddling. Some citizens insisted on removing the Confederate monument; others, on keeping it as a “teachable moment.” Opposing “symbolic politics,” the author hoped to “recontextualize” the statue, using public space to tell the full story of race. With the “Unite the Right” rally imminent, Signer began seeking a “silver bullet” to avert violence between opposing protesters, enlisting advice and assistance from experts. His frustration at not being able to shape the outcome is palpable. “I could have left more up to others,” he writes. He offers a thorough analysis of the “shortcomings” of First Amendment law and the failures of policing. Berating himself as sometimes “impetuous,” he emerges as a well-intentioned, proactive figurehead who suffered undeserved attacks on social media. Signer refuses to scapegoat, but it is noteworthy that most of those in power at the time are now gone.
A complex, disturbing, valuable tale of racial disharmony, government failure, and one man’s frantic attempts to save the day.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3615-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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