A sharp contribution to a significant topic that continues to generate heated discussion and debate.
A tour d’horizon of the historical relationship among race, racism, and mental illness.
Although Gilman (Liberal Arts and Sciences and Psychiatry/Emory Univ.; Seeing the Insane, 2013, etc.) and Thomas (Sociology/Univ. of Mississippi; Working to Laugh: Assembling Difference in American Stand-Up Comedy Venues, 2015, etc.) journey as far back as the Enlightenment, the meat of their investigation covers the period from the 19th century to the present—and the meat is occasionally chewy, with demands placed on readers to be conversant with, say, “the crowd as a forensic concept has its origins in the Lombrosian criminal psychiatry.” Nonetheless, in the authors’ tracking of the great shift from pathologizing race to pathologizing racism, they cut through a broad swath of theorists, many of whom will be known to general readers. Furthermore, the clear, spot-on summations of the familiar theorists allow readers a measure of comfort in the treatment of less-known theorists (until the necessary supplementary reading can be done). Throughout, it’s clear that what galls Gilman and Thomas is the expropriation of the subject by one branch of learning or another, juggling among medicine, sociology, biology, and psychiatry. Jews and blacks, understandably, are the subjects of much study, with the notion of race defined first in physiology, then the susceptibility of disease, and then the inability to find social adaptation. Ultimately, scientific racism moves “from overwhelmingly a biological condition to a socially constructed category.” Although the historical transit over the subject alone makes the book valuable, equally useful are the authors’ explorations of interiority, hatred, and crowd thinking. They examine Gabriel Tarde’s laws of imitation; how Wilhelm Reich bridged the gap between Karl Marx and Freud; and, most illuminatingly, “conjunction,” a “crisis between politics, science, and ideology...a period during which the different social, political, economic, and ideological contradictions that are at work in a society come together to give [racism] a specific shape.”
A sharp contribution to a significant topic that continues to generate heated discussion and debate.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5612-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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