Indefatigable journalism supporting a case that has become so politicized that facts assume secondary importance.
An angry investigation into the source of Covid-19 that will captivate readers who retain the ability to be captivated by this seemingly interminable pandemic.
Award-winning Australian journalist Markson has devoted two years to massive research, and although many details are now public, she tells a dismaying story. In late 2019, a nasty viral pneumonia appeared in Wuhan. This was no secret to local doctors and journalists, whose reports (and many journalists themselves) quickly vanished. Only at the end of the year did the Chinese government reveal the existence of a widespread epidemic, but they added that the disease was not contagious and well under control. Many books recount the consequences of this fabrication, but Markson focuses on how the pandemic originated. Two facts stand out. First, according to scientists, Covid-19 began in a meat market in Wuhan. No local evidence exists because authorities closed and sterilized it. Second, Wuhan contains the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a top-secret research laboratory. Besides studying dangerous viruses, the institute received samples from victims early in the pandemic. Labs around the world yearned for the samples to begin studies, but China refused to share them, and they were later destroyed. That animal-to-human transmission produced the pandemic was accepted by the scientific establishment, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, with suggestions of a lab leak dismissed as racism and conspiracy theory. Admitting the absence of irrefutable proof for any one explanation, Markson comes down on the side of an accidental leak. In the final half of the book, the author presents a series of interviews, press conferences, statements, archival research, freedom-of-information snippets, and statements from Chinese whistleblowers that document a detailed coverup accepted uncritically by Western media, scientists, and global governments, with few exceptions.
Indefatigable journalism supporting a case that has become so politicized that facts assume secondary importance.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4607-6108-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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