Columbia University law professor Williams laments the state of public debate in America. Williams argues that it is virtually impossible to discuss rationally such topics as affirmative action, racism, sexism, or sexual harassment because the terms of discourse have been so debased by politicians, talk-show hosts, and other molders of public opinion. In fact, she writes, Americans themselves are being robbed of their individuality and transformed into symbols. Though her critique is wide-ranging, Williams focuses especially on racism and poverty, saying that poor, single black women have become a symbol of all poverty, to the degree that they are blamed for its existence. In this new mythology, she writes, ``not poverty but poor people . . . are considered the enemy,'' and America has become ``disinvested in the humanity of poor children.'' Instead of addressing problems, ``the nation has let itself off the hook by espousing simple-minded homilies as cures for complex political problems of race and class.'' Williams mixes personal anecdotes as a black woman and single mother with scholarly analysis as she considers such topics as Rush Limbaugh, Clarence Thomas, and the debates over multiculturalism, political correctness, affirmative action, and family values. But her use of jargon and a tendency to ramble sometimes make her arguments difficult to follow. In general, however, she makes a convincing case for the importance of discarding homilies and symbols, ``listening across boundaries,'' and attempting to appreciate the nuances of individual lives, regardless of color, culture, or economic status. Blaming the victims rather than exploring the origins of such phenomena as poverty and racism is easy and popular but wrong, argues Williams. Like the egg a rooster claims as his own, she says, matters are often more complicated than some people would have us believe.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-674-77942-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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