A tour-de-force collection of essays on issues surrounding race, education, and American history.
Enfield explores America’s racial legacies in this debut collection of essays.
In the opening essay of this book, the author, a biracial millennial, takes readers to a North Texas middle school classroom where the young teacher struggles to get his class to engage with the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, echoing attempts by many educators of recent years to “pimp” their lesson plans by including rap lyrics in their literary analysis. While the author is inherently skeptical of white instructors who overcompensate by trying to be hip, the piece offers practical guidance for teachers. One essay highlights the psychological anguish the author experienced as a 13-year-old when his teacher tasked the class with making paper shackles, replete with stickers and glitter, for a lesson on the experiences of enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage. Another piece juxtaposes the decolonial and antiracist pedagogy of scholars like Edward Said and bell hooks with their sometimes strained practical applications in the classroom. Other essays blend autobiographical vignettes with biting commentary on American society. These include a survey of the conservative memes about Martin Luther King Jr. posted online by the author’s white aunt and his mother’s encounter with a skinhead at her workplace. With an MFA in creative writing, Enfield is a skilled wordsmith with a keen sense of American history and a deep appreciation for the Black intellectual tradition, reflected in the book’s bibliography. Particularly effective is the author’s recognition of the power of language, as he makes a deliberate stylistic choice to lowercase proper nouns like “america” and “dallas,” which he claims are “agents of state-sponsored violence.” This is juxtaposed to the capitalization of Black as a descriptor of men and women, with the author emphasizing “Black will stand tall, as we do, in this lower case america.” This literary subversion is illustrative of a collection that forces readers to think deeply about power, identity, and history.
A tour-de-force collection of essays on issues surrounding race, education, and American history.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-952897-33-7
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Split Lip Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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