A compelling account of technology-powered protest.
The credo of a Black Lives Matter activist.
Former school administrator Mckesson won prominence in 2014 after joining protests against police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, where he used social media to document 400 days in the streets being “pepper sprayed, smoke bombed, and shot at with rubber bullets.” Now in his early 30s and host of the podcast Pod Save the People, the author grew up the son of drug addicts in Baltimore and worked as a teenage community organizer. “We took to the streets as a matter of life and death,” he writes of Ferguson. “What else could we do?” In this deeply felt debut, he combines memoir with discussions of race and violence in America, offering an inside view of the BLM movement. “In each generation there is a moment when young and old, inspired or disillusioned, come together around a shared hope, imagine the world as it can be, and have the opportunity to bring that world into existence,” he writes. “Our moment is now.” Mckesson makes a strong case for social media as the key rallying point for this latest protest movement: “Twitter saved our lives,” he writes, explaining how the “new tactic for a new time” allows demonstrators to organize and tell their stories to one another and the nation. Much of the book focuses on police violence; together with others, the author created Mapping Police Violence, a national database on people killed by police. Such killings—1,200 people each year, with blacks three times more likely to be victims than whites—represent a “systemic” problem in which police control of information allows them to create an “uncontested narrative” and union contracts prevent accountability. In exploring his personal story of growing up a much-bullied gay black youth, Mckesson notes how comic-book superheroes taught him “how to imagine” a different America based on faith (that things will be better) and hope (that they can be).
A compelling account of technology-powered protest.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-56032-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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