As intended, McWhorter raises hackles as he challenges received opinions and entrenched notions.
Rousing essays on the nature of being African-American today and a dissection of currents the author of Losing the Race (2000) finds self-defeating.
Racism is not the greatest problem facing black people, writes McWhorter (Linguistics/Berkeley); even systemic racism is a surmountable obstacle that for the majority of African-Americans has been surmounted. The problem in the black community is a double consciousness in which “the ‘authentic’ black person stresses personal initiative and strength in private, but dutifully takes on the mantle of victimhood as a public face.” This collection of nine articles, most previously published, extends the arguments McWhorter made in Losing the Race: African-Americans must give up the “seductive drug” of holding whites accountable for every perceived problem in the community; avoid welfare and demand opportunities for self-realization, not charity and handouts; fight their unacknowledged “sense that at the end of the day, black people are inferior to whites . . . an internalization of the contempt that the dominant class once held for us.” Achievement comes from within, whatever life's imperfections, asserts McWhorter, but to pigeonhole him as a neo-conservative would be a mistake (though his use of the term “silent majority” in the subtitle encourages it). He is too freethinking, too likely to cite Malcolm X or W.E.B. Du Bois. His takes on racial profiling and slavery reparations are middle-of-the-road and reform-minded. His suggestions that diversity can be a mere tokenism will ruffle only a few feathers, although comments like “usually there is a transition period during which people on both sides of the divide rue the impending ‘death of their culture’ . . . but mixture wins out in the end” ought to get his critics jumping for their pens. His own critique of Cornel West's move to Princeton is little more than posturing and beard-pulling.
As intended, McWhorter raises hackles as he challenges received opinions and entrenched notions.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2003
ISBN: 1-592-40001-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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