A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by...
Notable contemporary thinkers and creators give their individual perspectives in this compelling look at violence.
The project started in 2015 when journalist Lennard interviewed political philosopher and critical theorist Evans (Political Violence/Univ. of Bristol; Liberal Terror, 2013, etc.) for the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. The resulting feature, “Thinking Against Violence,” was published in December 2015 and received widespread attention and discussion. The authors soon expanded on the theme, launching an ongoing successful series on violence that ran through 2016 in the same section, with Lennard and Evans picking the brains of scores of academic authorities and philosophers, including, among others, philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Simona Forti. Later, the series found renewed life in the Los Angeles Book Review, where the authors broadened the scope to include an even wider range of creative minds, including filmmaker Oliver Stone, South African musician and composer Neo Muyanga, and adult performer Mickey Mod. With a quest to “learn how to undo violence,” the authors compiled what they describe as “a series of conversations as a truly trans-disciplinary mediation with artists, writers and cultural producers that brings critical thought to bear on violence.” Often nodding to the pioneering groundwork of German philosopher Hannah Arendt, the book—a diverse compendium of 28 leading voices on the topic of violence—runs the gamut of themes, from violence in media and film to sex, gender, and race in the escalating age of violence. Other discussions include bullying and torture, war and terrorism, dangers of the normalization of violence, the influence of the digital age, climate degradation as a violent crime against humanity, and the important role ignorance plays in the perpetuation of violence. Other contributors include Elaine Scarry, Tom McCarthy, Moira Weigel, and Adrian Parr.
A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by learning from its violent past.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87286-754-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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