Next book

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE COLOR LINE

RACIAL POLITICS AND THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY

The bestselling author of Nigger (2002) explores the racial issues surrounding President Obama’s election and administration.

Obama’s historic election proves that race, by itself, is no longer a disqualification for even the highest office. It does not, however, signal any kind of post-racial era, writes Kennedy (Law/Harvard Univ.; Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, 2008, etc.) in this handy compendium of the racial concerns Obama so adroitly handled during the campaign and of the race-tinged issues arising during his first two years in the White House. As a candidate, Obama quietly courted blacks by his ready self-identification, notwithstanding his mixed-race heritage, as proudly African-American, by his marriage to a strong black woman, his church affiliation and his espousal of a liberal Democratic agenda. He attracted white voters by seeming to float above racial considerations, by calmly assuring them of his good will, his patriotism and his allegiance to the nation as a whole. Kennedy teases all this out, and he provides a short electoral history of blacks, a discussion of the “race card” charges during the 2008 campaign, a commentary on the racial dimensions of the lamentable “beer summit” and the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination and a moving, first-person description of the meaning and symbolism of the inaugural. Avowedly center-left but still an “unembarrassed” admirer of the president, Kennedy retains sufficient objectivity to properly appraise the much-acclaimed “A More Perfect Union” speech, Obama’s answer to the controversy aroused by the inflammatory Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Illinois senator’s longtime pastor. No, it was not a second Gettysburg Address, nor comparable to the “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, it was the effective response of an extremely nimble politician to a campaign crisis. It contained nothing novel for anyone even “passably familiar with basic information about black-white race relations over the course of American history.” Kennedy’s critique may be similarly assessed: nothing especially new here, but all of it well said. A carefully calculated, sober discussion of why race will continue to haunt American politics.

 

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-37789-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 25


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Next book

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 25


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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

Close Quickview