The fourth volume in Gay's series on 19th-century bourgeois culture (The Tender Passion, 1986, etc.): readable and intelligent, though debatable in its methodology. Seeking to prove that ``the nineteenth century was intensely preoccupied with the self,'' the author looks at familiar material in provocative new ways without ever providing the earth-shaking insights he seems to think he's garnered. Although he claims to deal ``mainly with ordinary bourgeois,'' Gay (History/Yale) devotes only a single chapter to the writings of nonfamous Victorians. Otherwise, his sections on music, Romanticism, autobiography, biography and history, fiction, and painting all draw on such well- known figures as Shelley, Coleridge, Goethe, Michelet, and Victor Hugo. Gay makes a good case for his argument that the Victorians, though they did not invent the art of introspection, democratized it by making literary examples available on a wide basis (thanks to the spread of literacy and cheaper access to books). He makes a slightly less compelling case that the elite's view of the arts as means of self-expression spread to the middle class during this period. Moment to moment, his analysis is unfailingly intriguing, as he dissects the Romantics' political narcissism, discusses how much truth autobiographies contain, and examines 19th-century historians' search for a usable past. But his oft-repeated central point, that ``at the heart of Victorian bourgeois culture . . . self-concealment and self-revelation struggled for supremacy,'' seems so evident as to hardly require the amount of explication he gives it; the disappointingly shallow section on novels similarly reiterates the obvious. A lot of serious thought doesn't quite hang together here, a problem highlighted by the fact that the book's only summing-up occurs in four paragraphs tacked onto the end of the chapter on diaries and letters. Stimulating, but not nearly as good as it should be. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03813-0
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.
Straight talk to blacks and whites about the realities of racism.
In her feisty debut book, Oluo, essayist, blogger, and editor at large at the Establishment magazine, writes from the perspective of a black, queer, middle-class, college-educated woman living in a “white supremacist country.” The daughter of a white single mother, brought up in largely white Seattle, she sees race as “one of the most defining forces” in her life. Throughout the book, Oluo responds to questions that she has often been asked, and others that she wishes were asked, about racism “in our workplace, our government, our homes, and ourselves.” “Is it really about race?” she is asked by whites who insist that class is a greater source of oppression. “Is police brutality really about race?” “What is cultural appropriation?” and “What is the model minority myth?” Her sharp, no-nonsense answers include talking points for both blacks and whites. She explains, for example, “when somebody asks you to ‘check your privilege’ they are asking you to pause and consider how the advantages you’ve had in life are contributing to your opinions and actions, and how the lack of disadvantages in certain areas is keeping you from fully understanding the struggles others are facing.” She unpacks the complicated term “intersectionality”: the idea that social justice must consider “a myriad of identities—our gender, class, race, sexuality, and so much more—that inform our experiences in life.” She asks whites to realize that when people of color talk about systemic racism, “they are opening up all of that pain and fear and anger to you” and are asking that they be heard. After devoting most of the book to talking, Oluo finishes with a chapter on action and its urgency. Action includes pressing for reform in schools, unions, and local governments; boycotting businesses that exploit people of color; contributing money to social justice organizations; and, most of all, voting for candidates who make “diversity, inclusion and racial justice a priority.”
A clear and candid contribution to an essential conversation.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58005-677-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Such bittersweet affairs are bound to turn sour. The first curdling came with The Fire Next Time, a moving memoir, yet shot through with rage and prophetic denunciations. It made Baldwin famous, indeed a celebrity, but it did little, in retrospect, to further his artistic reputation. Increasingly, it seems, he found it impossible to reconcile his private and public roles, his creative integrity and his position as spokesman for his race. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, for example, his last novel, proved to be little more than a propagandistic potboiler. Nor, alas, are things very much better in No Name In the Street, a brief, rather touchy and self-regarding survey of the awful events of the '60's — the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the difficulties of the Black Panther Party, the abrasive and confused relationships between liberals and militants. True, Baldwin's old verve and Biblical raciness are once more heard in his voice; true, there are poignant moments and some surprisingly intimate details. But this chronicle of his "painful route back to engagement" never really comes to grips with history or the self. The revelatory impulse is present only in bits and pieces. Mostly one is confronted with psychological and ideological disingenuousness — and vanity as well.
Pub Date: May 26, 1972
ISBN: 0307275922
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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