An urgent plea for individual and collective action.
Vivid profiles in activism.
Oluo, author of So You Want To Talk About Race, makes race central to an inspiring look at those fighting against the “deep, systemic issues.” The author considers punishment and incarceration, gender justice and bodily autonomy, labor and business, disability, the environment, education, and the arts, highlighting men and women who are enacting creative solutions to achieve change. Readers will meet Richie Reseda, who invented Success Stories, a 13-week workshop “that aims to help incarcerated men heal from violent patriarchy and learn how to handle fear, pain, and conflict in healthier ways.” The program also connects its alumni with support to find jobs. There’s Alice Wong, who has muscular dystrophy and created the Disability Visibility Project, an online resource that offers blog posts, essays, and reports “about ableism, intersectionality, culture, media, and politics from the perspective of disabled people.” Oluo, who identifies as Black, queer, and disabled (ADHD, anxiety, and chronic illness), stresses the importance of connecting disability justice work to anti-racist work. “Systemic racism and ableism,” she writes, “serve the same core purpose in society: to justify the oppression, exclusion, and exploitation of people based on a manufactured hierarchy of value.” For readers aspiring to contribute to societal change, the author ends each chapter with suggestions for interventions in one’s own life and community, and she appends the book with a long list of people and organizations that can serve as resources. “So much of the work that happens on the ground is really small things,” writes Wong. “Sometimes it’s just small, intermittent things. It doesn’t have to be a website. It doesn’t have to be fully formed.” Transformative justice, Oluo writes, “holds people accountable for the harm they cause, and it also holds communities accountable for how they contribute to harm, in order to prevent future harm.”
An urgent plea for individual and collective action.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063140189
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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