A provocative argument stressing community over individual responsibility.
The author of Killing the Black Body (1997) looks at our national foster-care system, the disproportionate number of African-American children within that population, and the consequences for black families and communities.
Roberts (Law/Northwestern Univ.) believes that the child welfare system is “a state-run program that disrupts, restructures, and polices Black families,” noting that while half of all children in foster care are black, African-American children represent only 17 percent of US youths. The author concludes there is a two-tiered system in place: problems within affluent (white) families are treated as private matters, while foster care deals almost exclusively with poor (black) families. Even while asserting that institutionalized racism and classism are embedded within the child welfare system, Roberts notes that “severe violence toward children is more likely to occur in households with annual incomes below the poverty line.” Contrasting children of divorce with children in foster care, the author suggests that in the former, a child’s relationship with the non-custodial parent is usually protected, while in the latter, the goal is to sever parental ties so that a child may be adopted. Maintaining that family deterioration leads to community disintegration, Roberts calls for raising the minimum wage in an effort to reduce poverty, the aggressive creation of jobs for the unemployed, a national health service, high-quality subsidized child care, preschool education, and paid parental leave for all families. Curiously absent from Roberts’s argument is any mention of the fathers’ role in these extremely poor families, such as their obligation to pay child support and to help rear their children. She tends to romanticize the poor, assigning to them no accountability for their current circumstances. Also troubling is her insistence on parent/child reunification in all but the most extreme cases of abuse—even in those families where the parent has a persistent drug habit and all of the children have been born chemically dependent.
A provocative argument stressing community over individual responsibility.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-465-07058-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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