A timely, often illuminating examination of systemic bigotry.
Graham, an attorney, details his confrontations with deep but subtle racism in his debut memoir.
The African-American author, who has a law degree from Yale University, writes that he once thought that his accomplishments would be enough to overcome racial bias in his chosen field of corporate law. In this book, he explains how this turned out not to be the case. Specifically, Graham describes a system of institutional racism, supported by white workers who insisted racism did not exist and by African-American workers who wished to avoid being accused of “playing the race card.” He emphasizes that the so-called “polite” type of racism is subtle but constant and that it quickly takes its toll. For example, he notes that only a small fraction of law partners and Fortune 500 CEOs are African-American; that mentors will often overlook African-American candidates; that some firms officially embrace diversity but do little to prove it; and that African-American workers are often left out of informal support networks. The author includes personal anecdotes to accentuate his points, such as when his firm’s publicity material listed every partner’s name except his own and when visiting counsel automatically assumed that he was a file-room worker. Graham also suggests specific ways that organizations can address racism, such as by genuinely investing in diversity initiatives and encouraging white employees to confront racist attitudes. Overall, his book acts as an effective reminder that prejudice doesn’t have to be obvious to be harmful, and the current political climate makes Graham’s goal—to see an effective, national discussion on race—even more vital. Some of the book’s final moments, though, seem to emphasize laughter over complaint and counterintuitively assert that “racism can never be used as an excuse for not succeeding in America.” Despite this, Graham makes it clear that the stakes involved are high and that much work needs to be done to counteract ignorance and resistance.
A timely, often illuminating examination of systemic bigotry.Pub Date: April 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5411-7117-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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