A hopeful, helpful prescription for overcoming polarization.
A social psychologist offers counterintuitive advice for bridging partisan differences.
Gray, whose University of North Carolina lab studies morality and beliefs, wants us to ditch what he calls the “destruction narrative”—the notion that those who don’t agree with our views aren’t just wrong but want to annihilate our way of life. He traces this outlook to early humankind, when our ancestors were more apt to be preyed upon by other animals. “Hardwired” to stave off mortal threats, we “intuitively” worry that those who don’t share our moral values might be harmful. This anxiety, of course, is deepened by social media, where misinformation and opportunism fuel ceaseless moral outrage. It’s a thoughtful argument, though Gray offers little evidence that “feelings of danger” are intensified because people doomscroll when they’re “on the toilet or in bed,” essentially defenseless. Relying on his own lab studies, he does a solid job of demonstrating that people who want to find areas of potential agreement with political adversaries shouldn’t rely solely on objective truths. Often, he argues, facts should temporarily go on the back burner. In an era when “everyone has their own statistics,” facts alone are unlikely to change the “moral convictions” that underlie a person’s views on climate change or sectarian violence. “Facts are essential to every aspect of life,” he hastens to note, but his research indicates that “harm-based stories” are more effective at lowering the temperature. People who cite “personal experiences of harm” when discussing issues like abortion or gun violence are seen as “more human and more rational” than those who rely exclusively on trustworthy data. Is Gray’s guidance a revealing indictment of American political life’s superficiality? Perhaps, but it’s clear that facts alone aren’t getting the job done.
A hopeful, helpful prescription for overcoming polarization.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317433
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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