Though the scope of the book is small and the style conversational, Kingsley renders the quality and complexity of life in...
A book so engagingly written and incisively reported that it will make readers who have never given a second thought to Denmark give at least passing thought to moving there.
It would be a mistake to think that there’s nothing rotten in Denmark, but this interconnected series of cultural essays by Guardian Egypt correspondent Kingsley makes a convincing case for how much the country has going for it as well as an indication of the challenges that lie ahead. The author examines the international success of The Killing, a TV series which “wasn’t so much a cult hit as a state religion” in its homeland and subsequently became the rage of the author’s native England (and didn’t fare as well but earned a cult following in its American adaptation). He extends his appreciation through the country’s “extraordinary culinary revival”—Noma is widely considered the world’s finest restaurant—and social services that encompass “childcare, healthcare and education,” including “university education and most of its living costs.” “Students aren’t seen as a burden on the state, but as people whose skills will one day support it,” writes the author. “They’re future participants in Danish life, and they’re treated as such.” Demographic challenges include the increase in retirees who benefit from that welfare state and the difficulties faced by anyone who doesn’t fit the Danish norm—not only immigrants, but also Muslims and others who were born there. Kingsley makes a strong case that Muslim protest over the cartoons of Muhammad, cast as a free speech issue throughout most of the democratic West, was a response to caricature “intended to provoke and humiliate an already marginalized section of society.”
Though the scope of the book is small and the style conversational, Kingsley renders the quality and complexity of life in Denmark with an outsider’s fresh perspective and a journalist’s sharp instincts.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5548-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Marble Arch/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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