An intimate, poignant look at life at the margins of society.
Isolated lives shine from dark landscapes.
After his father suffered a heart attack in 2014, journalist Sharlet (English and Creative Writing/Dartmouth Coll.; Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, and Other Essays on American Belief, 2014, etc.) traveled from his home on the Vermont/New Hampshire border to his father’s home in Schenectady, usually at night. “It seemed easier,” he writes, “the steep twisting road more likely to belong to me alone; the radio, when I could find a station, less clogged with news and yet more alive with voices. Night shift voices” that revealed “other people’s nightmares and dreams, projected onto the black night-glass of the car windows.” When he stopped for gas, food, or just to rest, he took snapshots, which he posted on Instagram along with moving narratives about the people he met during those interludes. Travels to Los Angeles, Nairobi, Russia, and Ireland yielded additional portraits of vulnerable “night shift voices,” individuals “around whom the veil of the world is very thin.” One of the longer pieces focuses on 61-year-old Mary Mazur, a disabled woman whose closest companion is a potted plant, which she carries with her when she forays out of her motel room, near midnight, to buy a Thanksgiving turkey. A mother at 19, her three children were taken from her around 1982, when she herself entered the social services system. Now, lonely and wheelchair-bound, she exclaims, “I’m not like everybody else!” Neither is Jared Miller, a “sweet soul” who started abusing drugs in the military and died of an overdose six months after Sharlet met him; or Charley Keunang, a homeless man in his 40s, killed by a police officer who claimed he reached for a gun—a claim contradicted by body-cam footage. Charley immigrated to the U.S. from Cameroon hoping to be an actor, got involved in a robbery, served 14 years in federal prison, and ended up on skid row. Gentle, dignified, and respectful, Charley was “one black life that mattered, no more or less than any other.”
An intimate, poignant look at life at the margins of society.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-32-400320-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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