A flawed but valuable case study of how systemic racism transcends political parties in America.
A Black businessman confronts systemic racism and corruption in Los Angeles.
In the early 1980s, Galloway joined a group, comprised mostly of minority businessmen, in establishing a cable television franchise that sought to bring the nascent utility to racially diverse neighborhoods in South-Central Los Angeles. Their request to access poles and lines, however, was denied by the city. Though Galloway’s group would ultimately win their case in a landmark First Amendment decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, it was a hollow, and late, victory. In telling the story of how systemic racism remains entrenched even in “progressive” cities, the book also highlights what Galloway sees as uncomfortable truths about the U.S. political system and racial coalitions. He directs his most vocal ire against the city’s Democratic machine and Black political establishment, including civil rights groups like the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Far too many Black leaders and organizations, he laments, were “willing to turn a blind eye” to corruption that benefited White business interests and denied Black entrepreneurs a stake in a multibillion-dollar industry during its formative decade. To make matters worse, cable television—run and operated almost exclusively by White-owned corporations—became one of the largest purveyors of “bizarre and aberrant” Black caricatures in popular shows like Cops and the Jerry Springer Show. These anti-Black images provided a cultural milieu in the 1990s that led to the creation of Bill Clinton’s crime bill, which further targeted Black communities. While convincing in its critique of Democrats, the author largely ignores Republican stakeholders who held significant interests in both cable utilities and media productions. Likewise, the book, while consistently interesting, too often drifts into screeds against the Democratic Party, with many of the same lines of argument repeated ad nauseum chapter by chapter, which distracts from, rather than complements, the book’s important story.
A flawed but valuable case study of how systemic racism transcends political parties in America.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73570-760-0
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Phoenix Publishing Corporation
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Atlanticsenior 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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