Sharp, brazen, and undeniably controversial.
A sweeping critique of the “wokescenti.”
Award-winning essayist, memoirist, and novelist Daum (The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, 2014, etc.), recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, takes on fourth-wave feminism, victimhood, identity politics, #MeToo, social media, ideological warfare on college campuses, and assorted other irritants in a culture that is “effectively mentally ill.” Social media, asserts the author, creates an echo chamber where people lie to one another and eagerly wait for friends to lie back. “I am convinced,” she writes, “the culture is effectively being held hostage by its own hyperbole. So enthralled with our outrage at the extremes, we’ve forgotten that most of the world exists in the mostly unobjectionable middle.” Examining displays of outrage as public performance, she writes that “the search for grievance has become a kind of political obligation, an activist gesture.” Accusations of sexism, sexual harassment, or assault, she believes, foster women’s image of themselves as victims rather than individuals “capable of making mistakes”; in making such accusations, women “literally hand men their own power.” Rather than see the gender wage gap as evidence of sexism, Daum suggests “that there are biological differences between male and female brains that can influence women’s professional decisions.” She also criticizes “the left-leaning chatterati” who praised Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me as engaging in “self-congratulatory reverence,” wondering “if my white friends and colleagues who venerated Coates actually liked his work or just liked the idea of liking it.” This suspicion of other people’s authenticity underlies much of the book: Daum admits that when she was an undergraduate in the midst of student uprisings, she “often felt like I was impersonating a college student…I had a hard time believing other people were actually for real.” Now middle-aged, divorced, childless by choice, and feeling increasingly marginal, the author is dismayed by those whose energetic engagement with social and cultural problems fuels “the exquisite lie of our own relevance.”
Sharp, brazen, and undeniably controversial.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982129-33-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
