Well-paced and good-humored: a page-turner.
A collection of vivid, engaging profiles written over the past decade by New Yorker staff writer Orlean (The Orchid Thief, 1999).
What do a typical ten-year-old boy, Tonya Harding, Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg, Orlean’s hairdresser, and the king of the Ashanti people have in common? Nothing much, but you’ll find them all profiled here. After opening her collection with the cry that “people are so interesting,” the author proceeds to prove it, in a few hundred pages. Whether following the Jackson Southernaires on their extremely low-budget gospel singing tour, talking with one of California’s fussiest interior decorators, or tracing the career of a champion showdog, Orlean maintains an infectious energy and enthusiasm for her subjects, and backs it up with telling details and observations. Chief among the her talents is the ability to really hear her subjects, and then to simply get out of the way and let them speak for themselves. The patter of the ten-year-old boy evokes a classic scene of American boyhood, the pizza parlor with an arcade game that’s always in high demand. New York real-estate frenzy is neatly captured in the world-weary observations of a talented real-estate agent who knows what’s happening behind every building facade on a Manhattan block. The speech of the bullfighter of the titular essay says worlds about what life can be like after you’ve begun to fight bulls to earn your keep: “Sometimes after you’ve fought and killed the bull you feel as if you hadn’t done a thing all day.” Some essays work better than others, but in general the collection is marred only by a few too many run-on sentences and the occasional quick ending, giving the impression that the author was writing to hit a certain word-count.
Well-paced and good-humored: a page-turner.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46298-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
A sleek, vital history that effectively shows how, “from the outset, inequality was enforced with the whip, the gun, and the...
A concise, alternate history of the United States “about how people across the hemisphere wove together antislavery, anticolonial, pro-freedom, and pro-working-class movements against tremendous obstacles.”
In the latest in the publisher’s ReVisioning American History series, Ortiz (History/Univ. of Florida; Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, 2005, etc.) examines U.S. history through the lens of African-American and Latinx activists. Much of the American history taught in schools is limited to white America, leaving out the impact of non-European immigrants and indigenous peoples. The author corrects that error in a thorough look at the debt of gratitude we owe to the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican War of Independence, and the Cuban War of Independence, all struggles that helped lead to social democracy. Ortiz shows the history of the workers for what it really was: a fatal intertwining of slavery, racial capitalism, and imperialism. He states that the American Revolution began as a war of independence and became a war to preserve slavery. Thus, slavery is the foundation of American prosperity. With the end of slavery, imperialist America exported segregation laws and labor discrimination abroad. As we moved into Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, we stole their land for American corporations and used the Army to enforce draconian labor laws. This continued in the South and in California. The rise of agriculture could not have succeeded without cheap labor. Mexican workers were often preferred because, if they demanded rights, they could just be deported. Convict labor worked even better. The author points out the only way success has been gained is by organizing; a great example was the “Day without Immigrants” in 2006. Of course, as Ortiz rightly notes, much more work is necessary, especially since Jim Crow and Juan Crow are resurging as each political gain is met with “legal” countermeasures.
A sleek, vital history that effectively shows how, “from the outset, inequality was enforced with the whip, the gun, and the United States Constitution.”Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1310-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
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