A provocative portrait that uncovers entrenched racism and class disparities in the debate community and in America as a...
Both the author and his subjects come of age in this thoughtful portrait of an urban debate team struggling to win matches on a playing field clearly stacked against its members.
Each morning in Kansas City, Mo., the students at Central High—nearly all African-American, many of them poor—pass through metal detectors to enter their academically deficient school. One bright spot is the debate squad. Coached by a middle-aged white woman named Jane Rinehart, it has fielded several successful teams on the national circuit. Local journalist Miller followed the program through the 2002 season, focusing on four kids who made up two teams. Seniors Marcus and Brandon ended the season as one of the top teams in the country. Ebony and Antoine, both new to the game, became competitive as they learned the style as the season progressed. Miller does not tell a simple story of triumph over the odds. Instead, he depicts the complicated relationship between Rinehart and her team, the kids’ sometimes bratty behavior, the vast backdrop of negligence and misguided ideology that have helped put Central’s students at a serious disadvantage in American society. His descriptions give the debates the drama of a championship football game. The style of debate was arcane: Kids purchased complicated “evidence” off the Internet and literally speed-read their arguments as fast as they could rather than engaging in debate in the traditional sense. While the author at first believed that debating offered inner-city kids a ray of hope, he came to see its current emphasis on winning instead of genuine argument and dialogue as reinforcing the privileges of wealthy suburban kids while discouraging the participation of teens like those from Central. Deeply changed during the reporting process, Miller became the team’s assistant coach, working to develop ways to bring new voices and styles to the debate circuit.
A provocative portrait that uncovers entrenched racism and class disparities in the debate community and in America as a whole.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-13194-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
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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