by Symone D. Sanders ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2020
Provocative, galvanizing words that should inspire others to take action against the status quo.
A black woman opens up about her journey to the forefront of American politics.
Sanders knew from an early age that being black put her at a disadvantage. “Wherever my pinpoint location was exactly,” she writes, “I knew for sure that I was way outside [the] innermost circle.” She also knew she wasn’t going to let the establishment—those with access to the power in this country, i.e., older white men—hold her back. In this snappy narrative, the author chronicles her internships and college studies, which put her on track to becoming a commentator on CNN and then Bernie Sanders’ national press secretary during his 2016 presidential campaign. She has created waves in the political arena and opened doors for those coming up behind her, much like Donna Brazile and other black women have done for her. Currently, the author is a senior adviser for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and she addresses the reasons she moved from one candidate to another during the past four years. Sanders interweaves “pieces of advice” sidebars into her personal narrative—e.g., build as many relationships and networks as possible, since you never know when they may be useful; write down your goals and work toward achieving them; be true to yourself in looks and manners; and so on. The author also includes a solid analysis of the political landscape and does not hold back her views on the Trump administration. The powerful message of her book can be encapsulated by these three sentences: “No one is going to hand you power or open the door for you to voice your opinion or your desires. You have to demand it. And part of the way you do that is saying out loud, to anyone who will listen, what it is that you want, and then backing those words up with actions.”
Provocative, galvanizing words that should inspire others to take action against the status quo.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294268-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior 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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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