An eye-opening, urgent book that demands an end to inequality as a matter of life and death.
The rate of deaths attributed to accident in the U.S. is appalling—and, but for lust for profit, mostly avoidable.
“One person dies by accident every three minutes or so in the United States, the deaths appearing unrelated and not particularly worthy of note,” writes journalist Singer in this searing, deeply researched account. But is that really so? Not when you consider the fact that Blacks “die in accidental house fires at more than twice the rate of white people,” that Native Americans are twice as likely as Whites to die of being hit by cars while walking, that West Virginians are twice as likely as Virginians to die accidentally. Such facts speak to structural conditions that disfavor the poor and marginalized. “Accidents,” writes the author, “are not just flukes or freak mishaps—whether or not you die by accident is just a measure of your power, or lack of it. She elaborates: It’s possible to slip on a wet floor, a human error, but the fact that the floor has a layer of water on it is a condition. Similarly, “to run an oil tanker aground on a reef is a human error,” she asserts, while demanding that tanker pilots work 12-hour shifts is a condition sure to yield error. So it is that pedestrians killed by cars speak to conditions. Speed limits are too high, for example, cars can travel too fast at the driver’s discretion, and pedestrian walkways are rare. Furthermore, countless industries resist efforts at structural reform, from slaughterhouses whose lines run so fast that “accidents” are inevitable, to auto manufacturers lobbying against speed regulators, seat belts, and airbags. Many people, Singer argues persuasively, are inclined to see accidents as something to blame on victims instead of looking at deeply entrenched structures of injustice. “If accidents befall the poor because they are poor, and poor people deserve their poverty,” she writes, “it follows that the rich deserve their riches as well.”
An eye-opening, urgent book that demands an end to inequality as a matter of life and death.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982129-66-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
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
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