A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.
A scholarly yet accessible examination of racial loyalty and betrayal in the African-American community from a distinguished legal historian.
Kennedy (Harvard Law School; Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, 2003, etc.) opens this energetic volume with a probing analysis of the ways in which Senator Barack Obama has been challenged to prove his blackness as he campaigns for the presidency. The son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, Obama, the author notes, has received a cool reception from black cultural gatekeepers who question his race credentials because he grew up in Hawaii and is not, in their view, a bona fide soul brother. Kennedy also cites Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Vernon Jordan as figures whose political and economic clout has rendered them suspect among the blacks and earned them the damning epithet “sellout.” The author traces concerns about race betrayal to slavery, when slaves helped thwart rebellions by alerting white plantation owners. He details the infamous case of South Carolina slave Denmark Vesey, whose planned 1822 insurrection was revealed to local whites by another slave, Peter Prioleau. In return for this information, white legislators freed Prioleau from bondage and rewarded him with a stipend that he used to purchase his own slaves. Vesey was hanged. Kennedy notes that African-Americans who’ve succeeded in the white world since the civil-rights era are increasingly compelled to pass a black litmus test. They are scrutinized by blacks, and some whites, on style of dress, speech patterns, choice of mate and allegiance (or not) to traditional black values as indicators of their racial authenticity. He devotes a riveting chapter to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a discussion of Thomas’s jurisprudence in several controversial court decisions, Kennedy notes that the “most vilified black official in the history of the United States” has proven himself less the “quintessential sellout” than his critics have feared.
A timely and provocative read on power, politics and the racially charged landscape of the 2008 presidential election.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42543-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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