A must-read about the power of artistry over overt oppression.
A masterwork about forms of self-expression during the times of chattel slavery.
The National Museum of African American History & Culture and Smithsonian Books have produced what should be considered the definitive text for understanding Black people’s cultural contributions to world history and how the systemic implementation of slavery throughout the globe was and still is one of the key reasons for a significant amount of artifact conception and creation. Having over 30 contributors who proficiently speak to the horrors of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, this masterpiece identifies how racially based atrocities and repulsive business decisions perilously affected millions of people in the United States, Brazil, England, South Africa, the Congo, and the many other countries involved with chattel slavery and its ramifications. Museum curators, experts, and academics contributed concise, informative, and limpidly written essays for this expertly produced anthology, which is as much a feat of graphic design as a spectacular work of nonfiction, mixing in its pages artistry, history, and personal testimony through a variety of visual, written, and aural narrative techniques. The book presents photographs of paintings, portraits, poetry, drawings, pottery, ironworks, tapestries and quilts, maps, jewelry, clothing, architecture, and more—all of which tell both the individual story of each creative person who produced the artifact and the collective story of the oppressed peoples who needed an outlet to express both their pain and their hope for a better future. The reader senses a certain catharsis from the writers themselves as they finally have an opportunity to tell the stories behind these moments of creative genius, whether they stemmed from a need for self-expression or religious epiphany or archival purpose or abject protest; the contributors, in other words, write from a place of sympathy and empathy, sadness and joy, adoration and awe. The book, thus, is “a living archive,” evidencing the freedoms found through inventive expression and illustrating how slavery, though no longer legally in existence, is embedded in the fabric of history and has left an indelible and tragic mark on all of humanity.
A must-read about the power of artistry over overt oppression.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781588347794
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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