Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.
A riveting account of the human consequences of the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Journalist Neus, who field-produced the rally for Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, uses the voices of counterprotesters, local clergy, elected officials, University of Virginia students, and journalists to lay bare the collective anxieties engendered by “alt-right” protesters. The result is a gripping narrative of psychological and physical damage, laid out vividly by Neus via the voices of those on the ground. On May 13, according to the Heaphy report, White nationalists in KKK regalia “formed into ranks…in front of the statue of Robert E. Lee and chanted ‘blood and soil,’ ‘you will not replace us,’ and ‘Russia is our friend.’ ” In July, notes the UVA dean of students, “the flyers for the Unite the Right rally had started showing up and they had very neo-Nazi imagery, a fascist eagle.” According to the chaplain at a local hospital, medical professionals “were preparing for mass casualties.” On the night of Aug. 11, White supremacists marched to campus, and a UVA professor “saw 150, 200 neo-Nazis with torches….The students were in a circle, locked arms around the [Thomas Jefferson] statue.” The next night, noted a student, “a group of white supremacists, some with their hands taped like boxers, punched, kicked, and choked people who tried to block their path, leaving them bloody on the pavement.” Amid the turmoil, a counterprotestor and former member of Congress recalls, “The shocking thing…was that [the fighting] went on for like three hours and the police still hadn’t moved in.” When the police finally did arrive, they pushed the marchers into a crowd of counterprotestors. A local clergyman remembers: “What we had for hours after that were bands of Nazis roaming through downtown.” Another: “There was blood everywhere.”
Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780807011928
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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