A masterful blend of narrative history and empathetic reporting.
The author of They Can’t Kill Us All returns with a timely investigation into the historic roots of violent White resistance to non-White Americans.
“OBAMA: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY.” That was the headline in the New York Times the morning after the 2008 presidential election. Within a matter of weeks, news outlets across the country would be offering headlines like this: “Obama Election Spurs Race Crimes Around Country” (AP); “Obama Win Sparks Rise in Hate Crimes, Violence” (NPR); “Hatemongers Poised to Exploit Obama Election, Tough Economic Times” (Southern Poverty Law Center). It seems easy to find a throughline from the election of the first Black president of the U.S. to the xenophobia and racial animus that were hallmarks of the Trump years. To help us understand how we got here, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lowery provides a potent consideration of the past 15 years within the context of American history. He shows how White supremacists have evolved from positioning themselves as defenders of the status quo to radicalism. “Today’s white supremacist movement is revolutionary—its explicit aim being to overthrow our maturing multiracial democracy,” he writes. As he tracks the historical threads of this movement, he offers compassionate and often heartbreaking profiles of the lives of contemporary individuals who have been irreparably harmed by the latest rise in White supremacist violence. Lowery has written extensively about the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri—he was even arrested while covering the protests—and some of the stories he covers will be familiar to readers. The murder of Charlottesville protestor Heather Heyer and the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Illinois, commanded significant media coverage. But Lowery provides urgent, necessary perspective on these events while also shining a light on deaths that fail to capture national attention because such deaths, sadly, feel quotidian.
A masterful blend of narrative history and empathetic reporting.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780358393269
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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