An arresting account of Black ambition and endurance from an important new voice in narrative nonfiction.
A unique synthesis of memoir and a history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Tulsa native Young, a FOX Sports analyst, offers an ambitious, forceful continuance of his debut memoir, Let It Bang, focused on his development as a consciously Black writer while dogged by the massacre’s uneasy centennial. The author opens with the horrific flashpoint, in which an ambiguous encounter between a Black boy and a White girl spiraled into an attempted lynching followed by the coordinated destruction of the Greenwood district, the so-called Black Wall Street, by the National Guard and White citizens. Decades of denial suggested premeditation motivated by envy over the accomplishments of the Greenwood community. “White folks decided they’d had enough of the luminous district many saw as a leprosy,” writes Young, “and they aimed to kill it.” In addition to recounting the history, Young interweaves a jaundiced, potent examination of his own upbringing. He rebelled gradually against his conservative churchgoing parents as he endured a casually menacing racism that reflected the legacy of the massacre. Yet while enduring poverty, depression, and a failed marriage in his 20s, he found improbable salvation in Oklahoma’s athletic tradition, breaking through as a sportswriter and radio personality. In the final chapters, Young highlights his emotional disbelief over the tone-deaf centennial celebration. “No one outside of this place much cares what happens to it,” he writes, “only what had once happened to it when white Tulsans murdered Black Tulsans.” The author also reflects thoughtfully on thorny subtopics ranging from interracial relationships to Donald Trump’s grotesque return to the rally stage, in Tulsa, at the height of the pandemic. The swerve toward the personal is occasionally jarring, but the author’s prose is consistently acute and his societal analysis, astute. “To be a Black American,” he writes, “is to want some of what white folks have and to hate yourself for wanting it all at once.”
An arresting account of Black ambition and endurance from an important new voice in narrative nonfiction.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64009-502-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
