Boldly grandiose, turgid, and remarkably unenlightening.
Florida’s governor describes how he turned his state into a “citadel of freedom in a world gone mad.”
While DeSantis offers few glimpses into his inner life, it’s clear that he has a healthy sense of self-regard. As he recounts his past, he depicts himself moving from success to success: Little League stardom, captain of Yale’s baseball team, Harvard Law School, officer corps in the Navy, Congress, and chief executive of the Sunshine State. The author presents himself as someone who governs through sheer force of will, never admitting to a single moment of doubt or weakness. At the same time, his ambition compels him to qualify some of his achievements. He characterizes his Ivy League education as something that happened to him, not something he chose, and he takes pains to portray himself as a perpetual political outsider even after winning three terms in Congress. “I may have been serving in Washington, but I would never become of Washington,” he writes. Burnishing his populist bona fides also means asserting that, while he was born and raised in Florida, his upbringing was shaped by the “working-class” values of family in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Most of the gubernatorial “accomplishments” DeSantis boasts about will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention since 2019. He touts his opposition to “open borders,” increased penalties for “mob violence” in the wake of legitimate protests, and efforts to protect students from critical race theory and children from transgender Disney characters. He devotes entire chapters to his refusal to bow to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Covid-19 pandemic, his attacks on “woke corporatism,” and his disdain for “legacy media.” Anyone hoping for DeSantis to dunk on Donald Trump is going to be disappointed. Except for a few subtle swipes, the governor cannily refers to the ex-president only when establishing himself as the new face of “America First.”
Boldly grandiose, turgid, and remarkably unenlightening.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780063276000
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
