Inspiring, though not as inspiring as actually hearing Barber at the mic.
A collection of Christianly-inflected calls for social justice.
The heart of this book is a batch of speeches and sermons by activist and minister Barber (The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear, 2016), the president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. Calling for a “moral movement…rooted in the constitutional and sacred values of compassion, empathy, and courageous dedication to the common good,” he advocates for a living wage, denounces “apartheid redistricting” and the Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights, demands quality public education and accessible health care, criticizes the death penalty, and insists that “it’s time for America to have a grown-up conversation about race.” Barber grounds his arguments in Scripture—in particular, the Hebrew prophets—and the Constitution. For example, he notes that the First Amendment gives Americans the right to disagree about topics like LGBTQ rights, but the 14th Amendment means that we cannot “enact laws that, because of our religious or private conviction, remove equal protection of the law from any citizen.” Often, Barber’s stirring rhetoric—his use of anaphora, his skillful interweaving of academic research with folksy quotes from his grandmother—radiates off the page. Each of the author’s addresses is followed by a response from a friend or colleague: Environmentalist Karenna Gore riffs on Barber’s call for action on climate change; peace activist Jodie Evans comments on his denunciations of Islamophobia; historian Timothy Tyson locates Barber in the traditions of Afro-Christianity and the blues. A few of the other contributions feel like padding. In early, clunky chapters, Lowery and Theoharis ploddingly argue that the biblical God cared about liberation and the biblical writers cared about the poor. Martin Luther King Jr. might be considered another contributor, given how frequently Barber invokes him.
Inspiring, though not as inspiring as actually hearing Barber at the mic.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2560-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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