by Xiaowei Wang ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2020
Technology writing with flair looking to a future that’s fast upon us, with China playing a leading role.
Engaging travels through a Chinese countryside in which high technology meets the old ways.
In this entry in the publisher’s new FSGO x Logic series, Wang, the creative director at Logic magazine, blends studies of agriculture, anthropology, tech, and digital art. The author opens with a modest protest that while it is easy to both romanticize and overlook the countryside, and especially Chinese farm villages, “many of them are sites of economies and agricultural practices that are foundational to our world.” China is now subject to the same market forces and consumer preferences as Western nations, so that everyone wants nice things such as high-quality organic food. That opens many doors to rural enterprises. As one entrepreneur observes, whereas big corporations such as Nabisco dominated the food world in the past, “hundreds of smaller, fragmented companies will dominate the future, catering to a continuum of different tastes and experiences.” One of the author’s recurrent themes is the use of technology to improve agricultural production, as with the farm of the title, which caters to “upper-class urbanites—people willing to pay a premium on food.” Along the way, Wang takes on science historian Joseph Needham’s famous observation that China ceased to innovate well before Western traders arrived. The author distinguishes innovation from adaptation to show that there is not only plenty of “disruptive innovation” occurring in China, but also an emerging “shanzhai economy instead of an innovation economy.” In this case, shanzhai suggests the process of retooling outside products—an iPhone, say—to make affordable things for a less affluent local market and, in the bargain, “decolonize technology.” Wang’s whirlwind discussion, smart and well argued, turns to many other topics as well, from racism in high tech to microlending, trade wars, risk tolerance, and a rapidly changing rural China, with delicious recipes as a lagniappe.
Technology writing with flair looking to a future that’s fast upon us, with China playing a leading role.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-53866-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
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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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
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