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
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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