A thoughtful and informative work that could have benefitted from a more cohesive structure.
A contemporary look at South Africa’s White supremacy in action.
Pulling together more than a dozen stories of South Africans from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, Fairbanks—a former political writer for the New Republic who has contributed pieces for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets—paints a sensitive, often engrossing portrait of the nation during and after apartheid. “I sometimes like to tell people recent South African history loosely collapses two hundred and fifty years of American history into about thirty—from our antebellum era into our future,” she writes. While the author focuses on three people—anti-apartheid activist Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, and former army recruit and proud Afrikaans lawyer Christo—the many other narrative strands sometimes trail into tangents, not all of which are relevant. The beginning of the book is somewhat disorienting, as the author does little to ground readers in the overall context. Some of the sections of the text are engaging, while others are dry and detached despite the moving nature of the topic. The most memorable parts of the book involve Dipuo and Malaika, both of whom emerge as incredibly strong, even heroic characters. While the author’s depth of detail into their lives is important when considering the tumultuous atmosphere in which they live, some readers may be startled by the candid discussions of assault and rape. Though these passages are necessary to convey the gravity of the situations, they will likely distress unguarded readers suffering from their own trauma. The scope of the author’s research is impressive, and she is to be commended for taking care to thoroughly and compassionately expose apartheid and the many complex effects that ripple out to everyday people, demonstrating appropriate nuance while allowing no space for the tolerance of oppression. Though the narrative is disjointed in places, readers won’t soon forget Dipuo and Malaika.
A thoughtful and informative work that could have benefitted from a more cohesive structure.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-476-72524-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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