Inspiring, though not as inspiring as actually hearing Barber at the mic.
A collection of Christianly-inflected calls for social justice.
The heart of this book is a batch of speeches and sermons by activist and minister Barber (The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear, 2016), the president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. Calling for a “moral movement…rooted in the constitutional and sacred values of compassion, empathy, and courageous dedication to the common good,” he advocates for a living wage, denounces “apartheid redistricting” and the Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights, demands quality public education and accessible health care, criticizes the death penalty, and insists that “it’s time for America to have a grown-up conversation about race.” Barber grounds his arguments in Scripture—in particular, the Hebrew prophets—and the Constitution. For example, he notes that the First Amendment gives Americans the right to disagree about topics like LGBTQ rights, but the 14th Amendment means that we cannot “enact laws that, because of our religious or private conviction, remove equal protection of the law from any citizen.” Often, Barber’s stirring rhetoric—his use of anaphora, his skillful interweaving of academic research with folksy quotes from his grandmother—radiates off the page. Each of the author’s addresses is followed by a response from a friend or colleague: Environmentalist Karenna Gore riffs on Barber’s call for action on climate change; peace activist Jodie Evans comments on his denunciations of Islamophobia; historian Timothy Tyson locates Barber in the traditions of Afro-Christianity and the blues. A few of the other contributions feel like padding. In early, clunky chapters, Lowery and Theoharis ploddingly argue that the biblical God cared about liberation and the biblical writers cared about the poor. Martin Luther King Jr. might be considered another contributor, given how frequently Barber invokes him.
Inspiring, though not as inspiring as actually hearing Barber at the mic.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2560-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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