A delightfully sardonic and sharp, if fragmented, commentary on race in the Trump era.
A Black scholar offers ruminations on race, language, and Donald Trump.
As indicated by its provocative title, this book refuses to pull any punches about race. In an eclectic mix of philosophy, social theory, history, and memoir, Abydos covers topics that range from Trump to the court petitions of enslaved Black men and women. With an expertise in the intersection of race and philosophy that leans heavily on the rhizoanalysis of the post-structural French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the author challenges readers through her “parodied” description of Trump as “our first nigger-president.” While explicitly acknowledging the epithet “must…be rejected and denounced,” she deploys it against a president whose ascension was built on White grievance politics. Abydos notes that while Whites are shielded from the racist term ever being used against them, which has provided them “a quixotic sense of hope and security…that they could never be as low as that,” Trump’s basest personal characteristics ironically match historical descriptions of the infamous term. As stated in the text, “Nigger is without principles.…Nigger is corrupt….Nigger is deplorable…,Nigger is unfit.” Throughout the book, the author also stylizes the word white with a strikethrough to show that “it is a social construct that functions as an identifier by a particular group.” Though at times the volume’s sometimes-incongruent themes make for a disjointed read, each chapter is remarkably consistent in its blend of scholarship and biting social commentary. Chapter topics include an analysis of how language itself upholds structural racism, a defense of former President Barack Obama, the history of a grotesque racist poem recycled for two decades by newspapers, and vignettes from the author’s life as a Black woman from Cleveland. The work’s references demonstrate a firm command of a diverse range of relevant, interdisciplinary scholarship and theory. While sometimes using jargon that may alienate a general audience, the author’s subversive and direct writing style will surely find readers far beyond academia. Admirably, Abydos is comfortable quoting a wide range of figures, including the rappers Cardi B and Rick Ross as well as the authors Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin.
A delightfully sardonic and sharp, if fragmented, commentary on race in the Trump era. (afterword, endnotes)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-76888-5
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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