Despite some overreaching, this volume delivers resonant, real-world insights about racism.
Neill continues to explore racial bias and current political divisions in this second volume of social commentary.
Following the author’s previous installment (subtitled Racism 101), Neill here digs deeper, offering a more advanced course in racism and its manifestations across the current political spectrum. The author begins by discussing the left’s tendency, as he sees it, to focus on virtue signaling and policing language rather than true social and personal transformation. From there, he uses examples from his own life, alongside interviews with friends and acquaintances from diverse backgrounds, to critique models of Black, Asian, Latinx, and other “minority” identities. (“Of course there isn’t a model for us,” jokes Leina, an Indigenous American, in one of the standout transcripts.) Neill urges white allies to improve the ways in which they listen to and learn from friends who belong to minority groups, encouraging them to research on their own instead of turning interpersonal relationships into coursework on racism. Subsequent chapters expand to discuss “retrenchment” (the ebb and flow of progress in social justice and subsequent erosions of that progress) and include a vast “primer on America” and its positioning within popular imagination. (“Oh my gawd Ted, like, why is this next chapter, like, soooo long?” the author writes at the onset of the primer. “But don’t worry,” he adds in his invitingly goofy tone, “there are pictures!”) In contrast to the preceding volume, Neill’s target audience and intentions are clearer here; he writes specifically to white liberals in need of refined strategies (the text is even illustrated with a cartoon of someone holding back a white man with a “stop racism” sign and the caption “Lord, save us from the helpers…”). The author’s jokes and good intentions sometimes buckle under the weight of his ambition—the latter chapters’ summaries of complex discourses feel like material from a dense university textbook that needs unpacking in a classroom. However, that need for discussion is met by the fascinating interviews with people from Neill’s own life; they help to ground and energize his writing and show promise for the subsequent installments to come.
Despite some overreaching, this volume delivers resonant, real-world insights about racism.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313810867
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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