In lucid, unwavering prose, Jeffers traces a lineage of Black womanhood in the United States.
“We are not only a race, and not only a gender, but both.”
To call this book exclusively nonfiction is unnecessarily reductive—like Jeffers herself, it refuses to be categorized. Instead, it leaps deftly between memoir, history, academic writing, and poetry. Across all forms and ideas, it soars. “I am still alive, because my women ancestors taught me to improvise—to shapeshift,” she writes. In what she terms “Soul Sister Shapeshifter,” Jeffers charts the ways in which Black women are uniquely positioned at the crossroads of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, and power. It’s a personal, political, and literary legacy that populates these pages. It swirls around the loss of her potent mother, a woman who traveled from her upbringing in a former slave shack to what she describes as the “Black bourgeoisie.” The journey includes a legacy of trauma, love, and intelligence, as her mother toggles the dual roles of “a strong Black woman” and a Black woman who is subservient to her husband. Jeffers is unflinching in her analysis, which is expansive enough to contain emotion and academic rigor in equal parts. “I found that it’s different when you read about the politics of respectability versus when you’ve lived that phenomenon up close,” she writes in one segment, noting elsewhere the exclusion of Black thought from Black experience in the historic record. With her “red dirt” matrilinear line in Georgia and literary foremothers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Jeffers crafts not just a history of Black women in the United States but an essential way of looking at their inheritance—one that folds familiarity into proficiency. Generous, wise, and fearless, she travels through the wounds of past and present with remarkable grace and gripping narratives. “Here I am, unrespectable and unashamed, waving from truthful territory,” she tells readers. We would do well to meet her there.
In lucid, unwavering prose, Jeffers traces a lineage of Black womanhood in the United States.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780063246638
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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