A well-argued case for the power of Black Twitter.
A media studies professor explores the intersection of television and social media in this debut nonfiction work.
Watching television “is always better when it’s done together,” writes Williams, noting that Black Americans in particular have historically consumed television as a collective experience, from communal viewings of Roots during the 1970s to mass engagement with major news stories like Magic Johnson’s AIDS announcement. In this well-researched, convincing study, the author argues that the nature of Black viewership underwent a monumental change in the 2010s that both challenged and fundamentally transformed the television industry. Calling this phenomenon “Black social TV,” Williams argues that “social media engagement by mostly Black audiences about scripted and unscripted shows with Black people” both connected Black viewers across the country and amplified their collective impressions on television media. Indeed, per the author, part of the success of some of the decade’s most popular shows—from gripping dramatic sagas like Empire and Scandal to reality TV programs such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta—was due to the social media engagement of Black Americans. The book’s early chapters provide historical context on Black viewership, media theory, and the representation of Black people (particularly women) in traditionally white-dominated media; the book’s second half explores case studies of specific TV programs. The final chapters look at how Covid-19-era quarantines further solidified Black social media engagement and address Elon Musk’s role in pushing Black media commentators out of their traditional home on Twitter to other social media platforms. Williams also discusses the continued exploitation of Black voices, particularly as the work of Black social media influencers remains largely uncredited and unpaid. An Assistant Professor of Journalism at American University, the author previously worked as a journalist in Mississippi and Ohio. Her text reflects both professional backgrounds—it’s impressively researched and offers readers an accessibly written and engaging narrative.
A well-argued case for the power of Black Twitter.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781793616289
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Lexington Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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