A strong offering that brings nuance and multiplicity to readers attempting to decipher the black male urban experience...
Watkins (The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir, 2016, etc.) anchors his new collection of essays in the voices, language, everyday realities, and dreams of black citizens of his home East Baltimore neighborhood.
“In the midst of all the black narratives stacked on bookshelves, we have a problem—a major problem,” writes the author. “People from the street are absent from them.” As an emergent writer with a background in the streets, he found himself a piece of “celebrity” after landing a viral essay with Salon. The author continues to offer deep critiques of the elitism and respectability that directly and indirectly censor voices of the multitudes of black experience, and he explores what it means to be accountable to his people in his writings. While these communities are overtly susceptible to the imposed hurdles of systemic racism, their experiences and worldviews don’t easily conform to the #StayWoke packaging of mainstream black-led protest movements. As such, Watkins stresses the importance of letting more people speak for themselves and combining voice with action on a wide variety of institutional and structural forces that impede black progress. He touches on topics such as education, policing, food deserts, poor housing, drug markets, structural poverty, and more. “The days of one black savior are over,” he writes. “Most of the people who identify as black leaders in the mainstream are too famous to directly interact with the people who need them the most. I learned to rethink what a leader is, what a mentor is, and how to be a valuable ally.” Ultimately, being driven by “a whole lot of love” has allowed him to realize that the greatest rewards lie within the work. As he writes, he is “blessed in being able to try” as he continues to bring East Baltimore to the world.
A strong offering that brings nuance and multiplicity to readers attempting to decipher the black male urban experience while uplifting the stories, visions, and love that incubated a rising star.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8782-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
PROFILES
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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