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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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