A spicy blend of humor, irony, wit, facts, fable, and heart.
The creator of the Mobituaries podcast fleshes out that material and also includes a wealth of supplementary essays and other new information.
Writing with Greenberg (English/Montclair State Univ.; The Cambridge Introduction to Satire, 2019, etc.), CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Rocca (All the Presidents’ Pets, 2004) displays his eclectic interests, ranging from Lord Byron, who makes two separate appearances, to the New Jersey Turnpike service areas. Most major sections feature a “mobituary,” which is a lament, sometimes serious, sometimes ironic, sometimes amusing, for someone or something no longer with us. Among these are Thomas Paine, the original Siamese twins, medieval medical practices, Prussia (“always coming up in the context of wanton militarism, which made me think…I’m pretty sure it must be German”), the idea of homosexuality as a mental illness, Billy Carter, Farrah Fawcett, and myriads more. Following most of the mobituaries is a section dealing with cases similar to the one(s) he has just discussed. His section on people confused for each other shows his playful sense of humor—e.g., he includes Joan of Arc and actress Joan Van Ark. As his lengthy Works Consulted testifies, Rocca has done his homework: His sources include not only biographies and histories, but also interviews (where possible) with the people involved. Occasionally, a small error intrudes—Mary Godwin was not yet Mary Shelley when she began work on Frankenstein—but the research is generally sound throughout. Though much of the tributes are funny and wry, others are quite moving (Sammy Davis Jr., a “supernova talent”). Rocca also reminds us of some long-forgotten figures—comedian Vaughn Meader, for example, who rocketed to fame with his John F. Kennedy impersonations and then plummeted after JFK’s death. Political attitudes are sometimes patent, sometimes not.
A spicy blend of humor, irony, wit, facts, fable, and heart.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-50-119762-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, “slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power.” No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through (“blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon”). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that “has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-614-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Flawed but poignant and often funny.
Comedian and Onion director of digital Thurston (Better Than Crying: Poking Fun at Politics, the Press & Pop Culture, 2003) delivers a “book about the ideas of blackness” in the guise of a helpful how-to guide to being black.
The author and a “Black Panel” made up of friends and colleagues, including one white person to avoid charges of reverse discrimination and also as a control group, ponder many questions about being black—e.g., “When did you first realize you were black?” and “Can you swim?” However, the humor does not serve the role of making light of race and racism, but rather as a gentle skewering that invites serious consideration of how black Americans are often limited by certain expectations concerning blackness. In “How to Speak for All Black People,” Thurston challenges the assumption that one black person can speak to the experience of an entire race, as well as the assumption that a black person can only speak to the black experience. In “How to Be the Black Employee,” he confronts the challenges of being hired both for the job and for being black—you will and must be, for instance, featured in every company photo. The humor does not always work; at times it is blog-like cleverness for the sake of cleverness (and is yet another joke about blacks needing white friends to get a cab really needed?). Thurston is at his best when he writes about his own life: growing up in Washington, D.C., attending Sidwell Friends School, matriculating at Harvard (“my experience of race at Harvard was full of joy and excitement”). The key to greater harmony is not necessarily seeing beyond race, but, as one Black Panelist puts it, to “see that and all of the things that I have done, to embrace all of me.”
Flawed but poignant and often funny.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-200321-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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