For Professor Sowell (Sociology, UCLA) ethnic America presents "a story of many very different heritages. . . the story of the human spirit in its many guises." Yet underneath the story lies the moral—never clearly stated—that America is truly the land of opportunity. In his all-too-rapid summarizing of ethnic histories ("Jewish Americans Today" receives less than two pages), Sowell searches out evidence (almost all from secondary sources) to present ethnicity in favorable light. Thus, the Irish may have developed their urban political machines, but "they were by no means the originators of corrupt politics. They were simply more successful at it, and performed with a warmer human touch." The Germans "quickly established a reputation for hard work, thoroughness, and thriftiness" and became renowned as "the nation's best dirt farmers." While Jews originally had to live in overcrowded tenements like other immigrant arrivals, their cleanliness protected them from some slum diseases; and, while they saw education as a route to success, their co-arrivals, the Italians, devalued education but got ahead through their willingness to work harder. The real success story, though, is presented by the Japanese, "emerging from war-time internment to earn median incomes 32 percent above the national average." With the blacks, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans, Sowell faces a more difficult task in demonstrating progress, but rises to it. "Their rates of progress" he reminds us, "look very different if measured from 1619, 1865, 1900, or 1954." Assuming the long perspective, he sees the black race as a whole as having "moved from a position of utter destitution—in money, knowledge, and rights—to a place alongside other groups emerging in the great struggles of life." For Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well, it all depends on your perspective. Most mainland Puerto Rican adults are still first generation, and "Few groups in American history could claim more progress in as short a span. . . ." Chicanos similarly have rapidly moved "from the rural Mexican cultures of the 1920s to modern urban America. . . a very long journey in human terms." Sowell seldom mentions the melting pot, but that's essentially what we have here: the old melting pot, by now a rather dull dish. If it's the human drama of ethnicity you want, try Morrison and Zabusky's American Mosaic (1980). If it's provocative analysis 180 degrees opposed to Sowell's self-congratulatory and depoliticized treatment, try Stephen Steinberg's The Ethnic Myth (p. 276). The account here borders on being yet another apologia for benign neglect.
Pub Date: July 10, 1981
ISBN: 0465020755
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
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