A thoughtful prescription for social change.
How to fight for justice through storytelling.
Journalist and activist Kolhatkar, host and producer of the Pacifica Radio show “Rising Up,” argues persuasively for the necessity of “narrative-shifting” in order “to change public consciousness to the degree necessary for society to achieve justice.” While she applauds efforts to promote inclusivity and diversity in employment, communities, and schools, she sees justice at the heart of her distinction between equality and equity. “Equality for Black people means removing official barriers to home-ownership, education, health care, and more,” she asserts. “But equity for Black people means reparations to compensate for centuries of enslavement, oppression, Jim Crow segregation, and ongoing systemic racism so that home ownership, quality education, and health care are actually within reach. Equality ignores the past. Equity addresses historical injustice.” According to Kolhatkar, reforms that can lead to equity must be grounded in revised narratives from news media, film, TV, and social media, all of which—even those purporting to be liberal—are dominated by White voices. Newsrooms in major publications, she has found, are mostly White, as are individuals who critique journalism’s problems; therefore, these critics fail to notice “that white domination is a serious problem.” Likewise, the White-dominated film and TV industries perpetuate “ugly and reductive narratives” about people of color and present images of police that “are in line with white reality and at odds with what people of color experience.” Both independent media and young filmmakers of color—such as Ava DuVernay—offer crucial new perspectives. Kolhatkar praises the rise of Black Twitter, “an organic collection of the unfiltered opinions of Black Americans on any number of topics, big and small, that has the unique ability to create trends.” Powerful forces for narrative-shifting, she asserts, include courses such as ethnic studies and critical race theory as well as one-on-one discourse: conversations that encourage “actively taking the perspective of others.”
A thoughtful prescription for social change.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780872868724
Page Count: 176
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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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