A complex, carefully constructed story of the development of the Black Muslim Movement and one of its most notorious leaders.
A tale of the rise of a Black Muslim leader, the death of a newspaper editor and the history of the Black Muslim Movement.
In his debut, investigative journalist Peele attempts to trace the winding roots of the Black Muslim Movement. Beginning with Nation of Islam founder W.D. Fard, the author moves quickly to the better known Elijah Muhammad before eventually settling on his primary focus, Yusuf Ali Bey, a former barber and Nation of Islam member who recognized the financial benefits that came from his rising power. In the early 1970s, Bey formed a splinter group from the Nation of Islam, solidifying his base in an Oakland bakery while profiting from both his business and his followers. Yet Bey’s radical teachings against the so-called “white devil” seemed at odds with his business practices, in which he regularly sold his products to whites. “Bey was hungry for wealth, and if he got it by selling to the devil, so what?” writes Peele. “In that sense the only color that mattered to him was that of money.” For Bey, greed quickly overshadowed orthodoxy, though money wasn’t all he was after. The smooth-talking leader also demanded his female followers “submit themselves completely to him,” a teaching that allowed him to rape and molest dozens. After Bey’s death, his son, Yusuf Ali Bey IV—better known as “Fourth”—eventually took control, ruling with his father’s violent tactics. After newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey reported on Fourth and his followers, Fourth put a hit out on the journalist’s life. In August of 2007, Bailey became a casualty of his story, dying at the hands of a Black Muslim assassin.
A complex, carefully constructed story of the development of the Black Muslim Movement and one of its most notorious leaders.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71755-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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