A timely, powerful approach to history that looks into the past to find a path into a better future.
An innovative reading of Black history, gracefully joining it to the larger history of all humankind.
As podcaster and “self-proclaimed intellectual adventurer” Fowler observes at the beginning of this rich book, there’s irony in the fact that the founder of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson, believed we should study not Black history as such but “Black people in history.” It’s a subtle distinction, but nearly a century later, Woodson’s vision “sits in the bargain bin of education, the place a thing goes after losing its value—its essence, its very soul.” That Woodson is not better known supports Fowler’s vigorous program of prowling the stacks to look at pioneering literature and those who kept it alive—people such as Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, who gathered thousands of books on Black life, and Lerone Bennett Jr., whose 1962 book Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America “mainstreamed 1619 as the most important date in Black American history.” Fowler consistently turns up intriguing surprises. For example, the model for the kneeling figure in the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., who escaped from slavery in 1863, was the great-great-great grandfather of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and the first donation for the memorial, dedicated in 1922, came from a formerly enslaved woman—ironic, again, since the memorial highlights not the enslaved but Abraham Lincoln, a Whitewashing of history that devalues Black Americans’ vital role in their own liberation. Drawing on the work of Orlando Patterson in the project of joining the particular to the universal, Fowler examines slavery as a worldwide phenomenon. “If we look back on such an all-pervasive human institution and assume we are incapable of committing such atrocities ourselves, we will fail to prevent it in the future,” he writes. Given revanchist White supremacism and its insistence “that slavery was benign,” what remains is to counter untruthful narratives through constant self-education and well-formed knowledge, which Fowler accomplishes in this book.
A timely, powerful approach to history that looks into the past to find a path into a better future.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781955905145
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Row House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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