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JOY IS THE JUSTICE WE GIVE OURSELVES

Name: JOY IS THE JUSTICE WE GIVE OURSELVES
Author: J. Drew Lanham
ISBN: 9798885740302

by J. Drew Lanham ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024

Lanham memorably, vibrantly shows how choosing joy is an act of resilience, courage, and power.

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Another luminous mixture of prose and poetry from Lanham.

“Miracles occur by evolutionary adaptation and seasonal migration,” writes Lanham, author of Sparrow Envy and The Home Place. On the same page, the author acknowledges that “people die by the police because their Black lives don’t matter.” The power of this book is in how well it holds the duality of these truths. We see that the pain created by humanity does not necessarily negate the beauty. Early on, he writes, “Be advised, every poem isn’t an ode to joy, and yes, sometimes there is sadness, or anger within the words.” Lanham is masterful at showing how, despite the struggles of climate change, war, and racism, among other societal ills, joy is present, and choosing to pursue delight in the face of injustice is a brave act. Throughout the book, the author excavates and elevates that joy. “Joy is the justice / we give ourselves. It is Maya’s caged bird / sung free past the prison bars,” he proclaims in the titular poem, demonstrating how the expression of that joy becomes a radical, even subversive act. In lush, sensuous prose, Lanham pursues joy in the backyard, with blackbirds “murmurating in an orange evening sky,” and in witnessing seasonal change. The author is both a naturalist and an agent of social justice, and this book is at its most poignant when these two meet, as in “Nine New Revelations for the Black Bird-Watcher”: “No one denies the eye-bending beauty of a painted bunting by saying, ‘I don’t see color’”; “Why are some immigrants accepted and others not? Asking for a European starling.” With his consistently engaging writing, keen eye, and generosity of spirit, Lanham is a writer to whom we should all listen closely.

Lanham memorably, vibrantly shows how choosing joy is an act of resilience, courage, and power.

Pub Date: April 2, 2024

ISBN: 9798885740302

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Hub City Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

Categories:

NATURE | ETHNICITY & RACE | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- PERSPECTIVES
Essay Collections That Expand All the Boundaries

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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THE MESSAGE

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

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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.