A complex, disturbing psychoanalysis of Obama and his political agenda, not easily dismissed.
A psychological profile of America’s first black president, with a review of the influences shaping his persona and policies.
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst R.M. Catton (Midnight Clear: An American Christmas Carol, 2006, etc.) and his wife S.W. Catton team up in this penetrating case study of Barack Obama and his political views. Organized as a series of essays published online from 2009 to 2012, their book paints a disturbing picture of a man at odds with himself and the nation he was elected to lead—a president with the determination of a messianic prophet who wishes to punish America for its past sins by redistributing wealth "wrongfully gained" by white Americans, by ignoring the constraints of a Constitution adopted by white Founding Fathers, and by weakening the nation’s influence abroad. The authors note that, despite being born to a white mother and being raised by his white maternal grandparents, Obama presents himself as a black man, though he “dislikes, perhaps even hates, being Black.” His self-loathing, the authors say, is due to a tendency “to regard persons of Black and White mix as having a flawed pedigree….Blacks are generally not widely welcomed anywhere except in their own native homeland.” Additionally, Obama may despise his black heritage because, the Cattons argue, he’s ashamed to acknowledge that the black race is the least successful in First World nations, it has the lowest IQ of all the races, and it lacks “Culture Capital”—that reservoir of literary, artistic and scientific accomplishment within a civilized society. The Cattons maintain that Obama transferred his self-loathing onto America for the nation’s past crimes against blacks; his political agenda, they say, is meant to equal the score and save the nation from itself. Although the authors’ writing style is academic and often eloquent, the text would benefit from footnotes and a bibliography. Still, they adeptly explain their points while bringing a clinical viewpoint to their case. Other books have characterized Obama as a socialist determined to destroy the American dream, but few have so intriguingly used clinical psychoanalysis to explain his persona and his policies, controversial as they may be.
A complex, disturbing psychoanalysis of Obama and his political agenda, not easily dismissed.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499527087
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
Atlantic senior 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
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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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