A thoughtful anecdotal study of protest in our time.
Take a knee, everyone, and start a revolution.
NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick did not act impulsively when, in 2016, he knelt down on one knee to protest police violence and racism. He had a long conversation with another NFL player and former Green Beret soldier, who suggested that the protest would be more visible and more meaningful than if Kaepernick simply refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem. “That was, it is safe to say now, a miscalculation,” writes Zirin, sports editor for the Nation. The year 2016 witnessed the rise of Donald Trump, “unrepentantly divisive and proudly bigoted,” who would go on to reveal his true racist colors the following year at Charlottesville; with Trump, a flood tide of White resentment and anti-Black acts would overwhelm the country. In response, as Zirin chronicles, players and protestors of many ethnicities emulated Kaepernick, sometimes courting significant trouble in doing so. These included a high school class of student athletes who collectively decided to take the knee in racially troubled Minneapolis, a cheerleader who acted alone in doing so, a Black student athlete in a mostly White community in New York who, appalled that the Confederate flag was being flown “as an all-purpose symbol of white supremacy,” launched a protest that caught on among young people: “I’m getting recognized for football,” he reasoned, “why can’t I get recognized for speaking?” Zirin closes his account, which is more in the way of vivid character sketches than anything driven by a governing thesis, with a conversation with John Carlos, who famously raised a fist in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games and who sagely counsels, “Love thyself. Love thy neighbor. Set a precedent and let them know that we are not the negative force in society. We are the positive force.”
A thoughtful anecdotal study of protest in our time.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62097-675-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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