A powerfully eloquent, concise book.
A Princeton professor of African American studies examines “Black democratic perfectionism” and its significance to the ongoing political struggle.
Glaude, the author of Begin Again and Democracy in Black, first presented this work at the 2011 Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series. Though he had initially intended them as musings on how the Obama presidency had affected “the form and content of Black political struggle,” when revisiting the essays a decade later, he realized that the ideas they expressed had become even more germane in the aftermath of the Trump administration, the pandemic, and the concomitant resurgence of racism and xenophobia. His first essay explores “the role of the prophetic and the heroic in African American democratic life,” examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr. within a framework that also includes pragmatist John Dewey. King was no savior, writes the author. Rather, he was a flawed human who followed the stirrings of a powerful moral imagination and acted on ideals that had no guarantee of succeeding in the real world. In the second essay, Glaude turns his attention to Malcolm X. Using the Emersonian idea that society should limit its reliance on heroes, the author suggests that Malcolm X was a “wounded, vulnerable Black man” fighting within a collective for liberation rather than a “shining black prince.” The author concludes with an exploration of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Ella Baker’s beliefs about leadership. Far from being magical or mythical, the power to enact change is a grassroots phenomenon that comes from individuals becoming “problem-solving agents” and acting collectively as servants of justice. Though they speak directly to tendencies within the ongoing Black political struggle, the wisdom these important essays offer about the true nature of democratic action is equally relevant to all Americans seeking to rebuild a ravaged democracy and its broken institutions.
A powerfully eloquent, concise book.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780674737600
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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