A convincing, if occasionally unwieldy, guidebook for a better future.
An educator’s vision for healing America’s traumatic past and politically fractured present.
A classroom teacher for more than two decades, Marra is the co-founder of the Fully Human at Work organization, which provides interdisciplinary workshops on cultivating a more conscientious and thoughtful culture in Americans’ relationships within the workplace and with fellow citizens more broadly. This book, which complements the organization’s purpose, provides a theoretical and analytical perspective on American history and its current state of sociopolitical division. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, the author notes, led many Americans to question prevailing narratives about democracy and equality in the U.S. Yet as appalling as Trump was to many Americans, according to Marra, he embodied a “collective American Shadow” that revealed “the worst of ourselves” and a larger history of American “ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, [and] bullying.” The book is divided into three parts; the first section provides historical and psychological context and commentary on the history and persistence of this “Shadow.” Part 2 centers on the whitewashed narratives Americans have told themselves, which minimize the mistreatment of women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Despite these historic wrongs, which the author connects to systemic issues that still impact the present, the book is optimistic in tone, emphasizing hope in the possibility of national healing. To this end, its final section centers on “strategies, tactics, practices, and ways of being” that provide practical actions that individuals can make in their own lives to foster collective healing. The author of multiple books of poetry and inspirational nonfiction, Marra is well versed in classical literature, philosophy, and history, and this work is full of references to Jungian philosophy, the writing of feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and often marginalized historical events. Despite a sophisticated presentation of critical theory, U.S. history, and philosophy, the book carefully balances nuance with accessibility and practical application. Still, at 500-plus pages, the book would benefit from a trim.
A convincing, if occasionally unwieldy, guidebook for a better future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9862690-1-6
Page Count: 515
Publisher: From the Heart Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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