A timely, powerful approach to history that looks into the past to find a path into a better future.
An innovative reading of Black history, gracefully joining it to the larger history of all humankind.
As podcaster and “self-proclaimed intellectual adventurer” Fowler observes at the beginning of this rich book, there’s irony in the fact that the founder of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson, believed we should study not Black history as such but “Black people in history.” It’s a subtle distinction, but nearly a century later, Woodson’s vision “sits in the bargain bin of education, the place a thing goes after losing its value—its essence, its very soul.” That Woodson is not better known supports Fowler’s vigorous program of prowling the stacks to look at pioneering literature and those who kept it alive—people such as Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, who gathered thousands of books on Black life, and Lerone Bennett Jr., whose 1962 book Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America “mainstreamed 1619 as the most important date in Black American history.” Fowler consistently turns up intriguing surprises. For example, the model for the kneeling figure in the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., who escaped from slavery in 1863, was the great-great-great grandfather of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and the first donation for the memorial, dedicated in 1922, came from a formerly enslaved woman—ironic, again, since the memorial highlights not the enslaved but Abraham Lincoln, a Whitewashing of history that devalues Black Americans’ vital role in their own liberation. Drawing on the work of Orlando Patterson in the project of joining the particular to the universal, Fowler examines slavery as a worldwide phenomenon. “If we look back on such an all-pervasive human institution and assume we are incapable of committing such atrocities ourselves, we will fail to prevent it in the future,” he writes. Given revanchist White supremacism and its insistence “that slavery was benign,” what remains is to counter untruthful narratives through constant self-education and well-formed knowledge, which Fowler accomplishes in this book.
A timely, powerful approach to history that looks into the past to find a path into a better future.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781955905145
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Row House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
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