A tour-de-force collection of essays on issues surrounding race, education, and American history.
Enfield explores America’s racial legacies in this debut collection of essays.
In the opening essay of this book, the author, a biracial millennial, takes readers to a North Texas middle school classroom where the young teacher struggles to get his class to engage with the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, echoing attempts by many educators of recent years to “pimp” their lesson plans by including rap lyrics in their literary analysis. While the author is inherently skeptical of white instructors who overcompensate by trying to be hip, the piece offers practical guidance for teachers. One essay highlights the psychological anguish the author experienced as a 13-year-old when his teacher tasked the class with making paper shackles, replete with stickers and glitter, for a lesson on the experiences of enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage. Another piece juxtaposes the decolonial and antiracist pedagogy of scholars like Edward Said and bell hooks with their sometimes strained practical applications in the classroom. Other essays blend autobiographical vignettes with biting commentary on American society. These include a survey of the conservative memes about Martin Luther King Jr. posted online by the author’s white aunt and his mother’s encounter with a skinhead at her workplace. With an MFA in creative writing, Enfield is a skilled wordsmith with a keen sense of American history and a deep appreciation for the Black intellectual tradition, reflected in the book’s bibliography. Particularly effective is the author’s recognition of the power of language, as he makes a deliberate stylistic choice to lowercase proper nouns like “america” and “dallas,” which he claims are “agents of state-sponsored violence.” This is juxtaposed to the capitalization of Black as a descriptor of men and women, with the author emphasizing “Black will stand tall, as we do, in this lower case america.” This literary subversion is illustrative of a collection that forces readers to think deeply about power, identity, and history.
A tour-de-force collection of essays on issues surrounding race, education, and American history.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-952897-33-7
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Split Lip Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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