A timely and provocative book that shows “what you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.”
A professor explores the ways “sexism, and racism, and classism work together to fuck shit up for everybody” and how feminism can begin undoing the damage.
“We [black women] are told we are irrational, crazy, out of touch, entitled, disruptive and not team players,” writes Cooper (Women and Gender Studies, Africana Studies/Rutgers Univ.). But as her feminist foremother Audre Lorde once remarked, this anger was not only legitimate; it was also “a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Here, Cooper brings together essays tracing her evolution as a feminist while giving voice to the political (out)rage seething within. The author begins by detailing the difficult journey that led her to “disidentify with [the] whiteness” of mainstream feminism and learn to embrace her “particular Black girl magic.” Her quest for political authenticity meant fighting with white women over racism and black men over sexism. Participating in these separate battles did not blind her to the need for alliances with both groups, however; they only made her more aware of the need for creating solidarity across communities to topple patriarchy. Cooper’s feminist journey also forced her to shed cultural “baggage”—such as the racism of a white society that questioned her movements on American streets and the sexism of black society that sought to control her sexuality through the church—that limited her passage through the world. Once uncovered and focused, however, the rage that inevitably comes from such injustices is of tremendous benefit to all. Cooper points to tennis star Serena Williams, former first lady Michelle Obama, and singer Beyoncé as contemporary black feminist role models. By learning how to channel their rage in their areas of endeavor, they have earned game-changing respect that has transcended race and gender. Sharp and always humane, Cooper’s book suggests important ways in which feminism needs to evolve for the betterment not just of black women, but society as a whole.
A timely and provocative book that shows “what you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.”Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11257-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
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
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