A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support.
An anthology of poems, essays, interviews, and reflections inspired by the COVID-19 lockdown, with proceeds benefitting independent booksellers.
During the pandemic, book tours have been cancelled, bookstores closed, and book deals delayed. What is the literary community to do? Write about it, of course, and try to find or make some meaning out of a period when everything seems so uncertain and unstable. Editor Haupt describes the book, which features contributions from “90 authors (68 in the print book and another 22 in the e-book edition),” as “this Lovely Monster,” one that addresses “a vast, overwhelming question that became the pumping heart of this book: What Now?” Of course, there are plenty of mournful pieces concerning illness and death in pandemic isolation, but importantly, there’s a sense that life goes on, reinforcing the spirit of interconnectedness as so many of us remain apart. “In telling our stories, we hope to enable you to tell your story,” writes Haupt. “That’s the sweet spot of connections, where the healing happens.” Many of the essays find some consolation in the feelings of grace and emotions of tenderness we experience now that we’re no longer living in what Luis Alberto Urrea describes as “our continual tantrum of consumption and aggression.” In a hopeful interview with Haupt, Urrea describes those suffering through isolation as “yearning for our better selves, desperately dreaming of a kinder world in the days to come.” The collection is diverse in age, race, and ethnicity, and gender perspective is a focus of many of the pieces, which offer informed speculation on the many ways that things will never be the same. In addition to some voices that may not be widely known, the book includes a smorgasbord of big names: Kwame Alexander, Nikki Giovanni, David Sheff, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dani Shapiro, Garth Stein, Andre Dubus III, Dinty Moore, and Ada Limón.
A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77168-228-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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 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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