A solid journalistic exposé.
Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Salisbury explores the reprisals against Muslim communities in Philadelphia and beyond since the beginning of the War on Terror.
The author focuses on two events: the closing of a Philadelphia mosque, Ansaarullah Islamic Society, after the arrest of its imam, Mohamed Ghorab, in 2004 by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the IRS; and government hostility toward anti-Vietnam War activists when the author was a Columbia University student in the late-1960s. According to the government, the enemy had to be sought out and destroyed, but in both cases the question remained: What/who was the enemy? Many crackdowns against Muslim communities had occurred since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, for which “experts” had at first “speculated with great assurance that Muslim extremists were responsible,” even though it was the work of a white, right-wing Christian, Timothy McVeigh. Following 9/11, pent-up anti-immigrant hostility and aggressive patriotism exploded in nation-wide “kill the ragheads” fever, resulting in random shootings, arson, beatings and removal of entire communities—all well-documented by Salisbury. The backlash overwhelmed Ghorab, an Egyptian immigrant and mechanical engineer who had started a mosque of several hundred in a working-class community in Philadelphia on the strength on his peaceful commitment to Islam. He had overstayed his visa, gotten entangled in a messy divorce from an American and was deported to Egypt in 2005, mostly on the government’s flimsy argument that “[y]ou don’t know what we know.” Salisbury surveys the sinister aspects of Att. Gen. John Ashcroft’s PENTTBOM dragnet and juxtaposes these strategies against the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of surveillance and the planting of informers amid antiwar activism of the late-’60s. Both operations, writes the author, proved damaging to civil rights and democracy.
A solid journalistic exposé.Pub Date: May 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56858-428-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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