A passionate, engaging combination of history, memoir, and examination of income inequality.
A well-documented study of land ownership among Black Americans and the accompanying land theft.
Land ownership in America has long been associated with trauma, going back to the early days of settler colonialism, slavery, and genocide. Baker asks, “What does it mean to reclaim that tainted history and desecrated land, land rightfully associated with trauma, to become not only a home but also a vehicle for equity?” The author chronicles her grandparents’ early stewardship of land in North Carolina before they were compelled to move north (to New Jersey) with the Great Migration. Seeking to return to their roots, however, Baker’s family eventually came back to North Carolina in 2012, when she was a teenager, and bought 86 acres. The author examines this trend within a broader historical context, beginning with the enormous strides in Black land ownership after the Civil War, when one in five Black heads of household had become property owners, a number that grew “exponentially” from 1870 to 1890. However, with Black ownership came the inevitable “whitewash.” Baker describes the (re)rise of white supremacy in places like Wilmington, where, in 1898, violence broke out, leading to voter intimidation and destruction of Black businesses. The violence forced Black citizens to flee, relinquishing ownership of land to whites. The author notes that the chaos in Wilmington created a “blueprint” for seizing Black property in subsequent riots in Tulsa and Atlanta. The Great Migration lured Black Americans northward to escape, yet by leaving the land, they grew increasingly impoverished. Baker investigates the “complicity” of the Department of Agriculture in allowing Black land theft, and she considers how Black and Indigenous groups have shared land trauma and worked together; the issue of reparations; and Hazel Johnson and the rise of the environmental justice movement.
A passionate, engaging combination of history, memoir, and examination of income inequality.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593447376
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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