A practical and impassioned parenting guide.
With the assistance of Beard (Health First!: The Black Woman's Wellness Guide, 2012, etc.), independent filmmakers Brewster and Stephenson examine concrete ways black parents can enhance their sons’ potential for success in a world prejudiced against black males.
Seeking to give their son, Idris, the education that would help the youngster “bypass racism and achieve his human potential,” Brewster and his wife, Stephenson, enrolled him at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. It quickly became evident that however progressive Dalton proclaimed to be, the school was as elitist as it was racially biased. Written as a response to the “struggles, tears and frustration” their son faced, this book is also a companion to American Promise, an acclaimed 2013 documentary Brewster and his wife made about Idris’ Dalton experiences, as well as those of his fellow students of color. The authors offer a plethora of information and advice geared toward the specific developmental needs of black boys. For Brewster and Stephenson, preparation begins before birth and includes everything from taking parenting classes to eating only the most nutritious foods. Once the child is born, the parents must work to establish secure emotional attachments with their son and develop his higher brain functions through consistent and conscientious verbal engagement. Once the child is older, they must not only protect him from the traps of excessive media consumption and drugs; they must also warn him about “overreactive teachers, principals and police officers” by having honest conversations about race and racial injustice. Their involvement should also extend into schools and classrooms, where low expectations for black males breed failure. Thorough and detailed, this guidebook is also a call to action. As Brewster sees it, when people of color remain complacent, they not only break a tacit promise to future generations to achieve social equity, they also imperil the futures of both the nation and the planet.
A practical and impassioned parenting guide.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8489-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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