A cogent history and analysis of today’s toxic national discourse, joining a host of recent titles in a burgeoning genre.
A long-view denunciation of today’s avalanche of disinformation, fake news, and propaganda.
Newitz, journalist, host of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast, and author of Four Lost Cities, among works of science fiction, argues that “weaponized storytelling” has been an American tradition throughout its history. During the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin published a fake newspaper article describing a fictional British officer’s delight at boxes of scalps from colonial settlers, women, and children, delivered by Native American allies. Reprinted widely, it produced universal outrage. The author moves on to examine what some scholars proclaim was America’s “foundational moment”—not the Revolution but the Indian Wars, when white settlers replaced Indigenous communities with their own. Readers long familiar with the deplorable treatment of Native Americans during the 19th century may be inclined to skim these sections, but matters will not improve as Newitz recounts other outrages. They join the steady stream of debunkers of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), the bible of scientific racism—though they warn that the audience for deeply satisfying fables is largely impervious to the facts. The author makes a convincing case that the 21st-century epidemic of intolerance, invective, and authoritarian movements is as American as apple pie. In the obligatory how-to-fix-it conclusion, Newitz emphasizes tolerance, agreeing to disagree, and promoting evidence over emotion. They do not ignore traditional pleas to reform public education and the internet, but admit that they haven’t caught on. Searching for alternatives, the author promotes spreading democratic ideals through storytelling in “applied science fiction” or a transformed, “rejuvenated” public library. “When we immerse ourselves in the silence of the library,” writes Newitz, “we learn the most fundamental defense against psyops. Our minds belong to us.”
A cogent history and analysis of today’s toxic national discourse, joining a host of recent titles in a burgeoning genre.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780393881516
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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