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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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