An engaging analysis of the persistent vestiges of colonialism.
A South African psychologist surveys the lasting legacies of systemic racism in this debut book.
Borrowing from Albert Camus’ apothegm regarding the aftermath of Europe’s bubonic plague—the “rats had never left but went underground”—author Karani argues that, although we may live in a post-colonial world, colonialism’s legacy of systemic racism is still with us in “embedded mindsets.” Believing that “overcoming colonialism’s insidious impact requires freeing the oppressed mind,” the author offers readers a historical survey of colonialism and racist ideology from European enslavement of Africans through the killing of George Floyd and police response to Black Lives Matter protests. Interspersed throughout are more theoretical assessments that explore, for instance, anti-intellectualism in the United States and the toll of racism on Black mental health. Karani’s astute observations arise not only from his extensive research (the book includes 300-plus endnotes) and scholarly background as a clinical psychologist and professor, but also from personal experience. South Africa’s apartheid regime forcibly closed his father’s retail business in 1959, effectively condemning his family to poverty. Young Karani followed the leadership of Steve Biko and other revolutionaries who formed the Black Consciousness Movement. This “self-identification” as Black in a nation that divided colonized people into competing racial categories “empowered” Karani to pursue advanced academic degrees and convinced him that previously colonized people must dismantle the mental shackles and other ideological constructs left in colonization’s wake. Additionally, Karani’s later immigration to Canada, his current home, revealed an equally painful legacy of sustained discrimination toward Black immigrants and an even worse history of genocide against Indigenous citizens despite its comparative stability as a liberal democracy that nominally supports multiculturalism and human rights. This work is particularly adept at condensing longue durée history across multiple periods and continents, as well as complex colonial and post-colonial theories, into an accessible, well-written narrative accompanied by textbox vignettes and charts.
An engaging analysis of the persistent vestiges of colonialism.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2022
ISBN: 9781039139862
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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