Not without flaws, but a compellingly honest manifesto about authenticity.
The famous Black radio and TV personality makes the case for raising the bar on the quality of our conversations.
Charlamagne Tha God, author of Black Privilege, hates small talk. Rather than using the traditional definition of small talk as idle chatter, the author describes it as “a symbol of our lack of authentic communication. Both as individuals and collectively.” Throughout the book, he provides examples of types of small talk and the damage that it can do. In one chapter, he discusses how right-wing politicians often excel at unvarnished, blunt conversation, a trend that garners them votes while politicians like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris—whom the author admires—lose support due to their perceived lack of authenticity. Elsewhere, the author critiques his own history of emulating “shock jocks” and states his new commitment to elevating the level of conversation on his morning radio show, The Breakfast Club. He also spends time criticizing the social media landscape that has led to young people’s sense of “entitlement” that he feels is both detrimental to their development and uncharacteristic of previous generations. “Back in the day,” he writes, “no one felt the need to put on a front when they were just starting out.” Throughout, Charlamagne returns to the premise that honest conversations can change the world. “Now I want to encourage you to make rejecting small talk a priority in your life,” he pleads, “because small talk is killing us as a society.” The author’s voice is frank, funny, and intimate, and his capacity for vulnerability drives his storytelling. At times, his signature brashness crosses the line—as, for instance, when he unnecessarily repeats verbatim a homophobic joke his father used to tell—and his analysis can lean toward the patriarchal.
Not without flaws, but a compellingly honest manifesto about authenticity.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781982173791
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Black Privilege Publishing/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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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