The first half of a comprehensive history of the development of Western notions of liberty and freedom. Harvard sociologist Patterson (Slavery and Social Depth, 1982, etc.) goes beyond the usual framework of intellectual history to show how European culture gave birth to, and was itself formed by, the concept of personal liberty. Patterson begins with the thesis that the idea of freedom was generated reactively—that is, in response to the daily spectacle of institutionalized slavery. To be free was, most obviously, not to be a slave. The Peloponnesian War, by subjecting an unprecedented number of captives to slavery, brought the awareness of freedom to the fore of society's attention as never before and provided the impetus for much of Greek drama and philosophy, Patterson says. The notion of the slave as someone legally dead, whose life was forfeit by circumstance and who lived only through the will of the master, created an intellectual tension that was answered by concepts of tragedy and redemption. These ideas were later amplified by the Roman stoics, but it was only in the nascent cult of Christianity—and preeminently in the writings of St. Paul and St. Augustine—that they reached their most systematic development. Patterson is at pains to show also that the sensibility to issues of freedom and constraint is a particularly ``feminine'' process, since women always and everywhere comprised the great majority of those enslaved. His examination of the Middle Ages lacks the penetration of his view of antiquity, but he manages to depict the fledgling birth of nationalism and absolutism as they arose out of the struggles for loyalty engendered by urbanization and rising prosperity. A profound and authoritative work that breaks new ground in its approach and will possibly alter the course of social studies for years to come.
Pub Date: June 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-465-02535-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | MODERN | POLITICS | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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