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
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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