A vigorous complement to other primers in political activism and social justice.
A blend of memoir and manifesto by Black Lives Matter leader King.
Born in 1979, the author was already a well-known activist, using social media for progressive causes, when a friend and Morehouse College classmate sent him a note advising him of a YouTube post showing the infamous 2014 “I can’t breathe” killing of Eric Garner by New York police. “The case and the injustice of the murder…consumed me from that day forward,” he writes. “I took it personally.” He dug deep to discover that the NYPD had banned the chokehold that killed Garner two decades earlier and discovered that police across the country “have shot and killed an average of three people a day,” most of whom never made the national news cycle, especially if they were members of ethnic minorities. Things are worse than ever, King writes, in a book that shares the spirit of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The institutions that ostensibly protect all citizens are crumbling, gradually overcome by a creeping fascism that has risen slowly and stealthily over decades. What’s to be done? “Making change isn’t theoretical,” writes the author. “You have to get out there and fight for it. You have to be in the game, in the campaign, in the war.” Of course, that fight will involve losing some battles, as King’s mentor Bernie Sanders, who provides the foreword, has experienced, and it’s likely to be met by objections on the part of well-meaning people: “Nobody believes in me,” “I’ll start later,” “I’m afraid of failure.” There’s no time for all that, and King advises instead getting out and becoming involved in grassroots movements: “Don’t be pushy to the point of weirdness, but exchange information, and let them know that you are hoping to volunteer alongside them and could start immediately.” That encouragement is welcome, and in any event, writes King, those who oppose democratic change are busy on their end: “They are not passive defenders of the status quo but deliberate, forceful advocates of it.”
A vigorous complement to other primers in political activism and social justice.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-04800-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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