Americans did not create the ghetto, but in this well-documented study, we see clearly how those urban areas have come to...
How communities—especially in the United States—created, ostracized, and condemned the idea and reality of the ghetto.
For more than 500 years, urban societies have found ways to coerce, compel, and otherwise force perceived undesirable groups into their own isolated and sometimes literally enclosed areas of cities. These areas, known as “ghettoes,” most often served to separate Jews from the rest of the population. Yet today, when Americans hear the word “ghetto,” they are most likely to associate it with the African-American “inner city.” In this fine book, Duneier (Sociology/Princeton Univ.; Sidewalk, 1999, etc.), a sociologist who has a knack for writing for general audiences, examines the history of the spaces that came to be called ghettos as well as the concept of them. In the first chapter, the author clearly shows the long history of the ghettos that emerged in Europe to isolate Jews, and he emphasizes the way the Nazis brought the stigmatization of Jews to its most extreme manifestation. He then follows with a series of chapters that alternate between Chicago and New York’s Harlem and the individuals who confronted the emergent ghettos in those cities. Duneier effectively merges scholarship with a journalist’s eye for detail and compellingly reveals the myriad ways in which the ghetto has come to embody the fears and failures of the societies where they have manifested. However, given that he notes how it is ahistorical to associate the idea of the ghetto primarily with black Americans since American ghettos make up only about 10 percent of the 500-year history of their existence, it is curious that roughly 90 percent of his book is devoted to precisely that anachronism. An expansion of the themes of his first chapter would have strengthened the book. Nonetheless, this is accessible historical sociology that deserves a wide readership.
Americans did not create the ghetto, but in this well-documented study, we see clearly how those urban areas have come to embody so many of our shortcomings when it comes to matters of race.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16180-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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