A complex, carefully constructed story of the development of the Black Muslim Movement and one of its most notorious leaders.
A tale of the rise of a Black Muslim leader, the death of a newspaper editor and the history of the Black Muslim Movement.
In his debut, investigative journalist Peele attempts to trace the winding roots of the Black Muslim Movement. Beginning with Nation of Islam founder W.D. Fard, the author moves quickly to the better known Elijah Muhammad before eventually settling on his primary focus, Yusuf Ali Bey, a former barber and Nation of Islam member who recognized the financial benefits that came from his rising power. In the early 1970s, Bey formed a splinter group from the Nation of Islam, solidifying his base in an Oakland bakery while profiting from both his business and his followers. Yet Bey’s radical teachings against the so-called “white devil” seemed at odds with his business practices, in which he regularly sold his products to whites. “Bey was hungry for wealth, and if he got it by selling to the devil, so what?” writes Peele. “In that sense the only color that mattered to him was that of money.” For Bey, greed quickly overshadowed orthodoxy, though money wasn’t all he was after. The smooth-talking leader also demanded his female followers “submit themselves completely to him,” a teaching that allowed him to rape and molest dozens. After Bey’s death, his son, Yusuf Ali Bey IV—better known as “Fourth”—eventually took control, ruling with his father’s violent tactics. After newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey reported on Fourth and his followers, Fourth put a hit out on the journalist’s life. In August of 2007, Bailey became a casualty of his story, dying at the hands of a Black Muslim assassin.
A complex, carefully constructed story of the development of the Black Muslim Movement and one of its most notorious leaders.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71755-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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