An engaging memoir of not just a fascinating woman, but a history of a movement.
The memoir of a Black Nationalist, reformer, and lawyer.
Taifa’s life reflects the dual story of a reformer on the inside of a discriminatory system and that of a Black Nationalist revolutionary. As such, her memoir takes readers to dining room tables accompanied by Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, to early Kwanzaa celebrations at the Temple of the Black Messiah, and to behind-the-scenes meetings of the Black separatist Republic of New Afrika, while later taking them to the Roosevelt Room of the White House, to meetings with Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and to Taifa’s work as a policy analyst for billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Personally involved in a variety of Black Nationalist groups in the 1970s, and later working for decades as a lawyer advocating criminal justice reform, Taifa’s memoir is not just a retelling of her own life’s story, but serves as a vital history of the post-1960s fight for Black liberation. It is, in her own words, “part memoir, part textbook, part study guide, part exposé,”[xii] as she weaves her own story into the wider history of Nationalists like H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Chokwe Lumumba, and Assata Shakur. The work also discusses a more internal struggle of a Black Nationalist woman who spent years “on the cutting-edge of revolutionary action,” but whose legal career for change inside the system often requires her to play the part of a “responsible” reformer.[4] Nor does she hold back on her personal life, openly discussing her experiences with sexual abuse, two failed marriages, and a frantic hunt for a missing sex-tape. Nearly every chapter is richly adorned with historical photographs or snapshots of the author with an assortment of Black revolutionary celebrities. Original poetry, mostly centered on Black Nationalist and Pan-African themes, is similarly sprinkled throughout her narrative. While Taifa’s bold attempt to tell both her own story and that of a larger history of the Black experience can be at times cumbersome, this is nevertheless a powerful, important book.
An engaging memoir of not just a fascinating woman, but a history of a movement.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 396
Publisher: House of Songhay II
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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