Sad, revealing testimony to the continuing effects of racism and inequality.
Black millennials offer candid views of the challenges they face.
In her first book, journalist and broadcast producer Allen, an Eisner Fellow at the Nation Institute, investigates how the enduring myth of the American dream relates to young blacks between the ages of 18 and 30: “folks,” she writes, “who looked like me.” The American dream—“the idea that anyone can succeed and enjoy a prosperous life through hard work”—applies, the author asserts, only “to a limited number of people.” For oppressed and marginalized blacks, the dream has been largely unattainable. Has that changed, Allen asks, for a new generation? What does upward mobility look like for them? How do they express their own dreams? Drawing on interviews with 75 millennials as well as studies, surveys, and articles, the author recounts stories of defeat and dashed hopes from blacks who feel that the American dream “wasn’t and isn’t for them.” Among their frustrations is education: Many believe that a college degree is essential to their future success, accumulating huge debt to pay for schooling. More than 80 percent of Blacks who complete bachelor’s degrees have debt upon graduating, compared with 64 percent of whites. Moreover, a college education does not ensure employment: “The unemployment rate for Black college graduates is the same as for White high school graduates.” For those who manage to pursue a professional career, the workplace often feels unwelcoming. As one woman told her, “Black millennials do not have stability and security” in their jobs; they are often paid less than whites, are not offered career guidance and mentorship, and “often walk a tightrope between the hood and the elite.” Home ownership eludes many blacks, as well, with redlining and predatory lenders victimizing prospective buyers. Frustrated with their efforts to hold on to middle-class status, some blacks are redefining what success means to them, rejecting ‘the White-picket fence version of the dream” in favor of “what the dream means at its core: freedom.”
Sad, revealing testimony to the continuing effects of racism and inequality.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-56858-586-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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