An engaging record of how Black pain and endurance can lead to Black excellence.
How the Black American experience nurtures abilities that lead to career success.
Sanders, a writer, director, and actor, assembles a cast of African American “high achievers” to demonstrate how power can be derived from the “trauma and suffering” involved in navigating Whiteness in the U.S. Illuminating the “magic” he has acquired as a Black man in America—abilities “that cannot be taught or bought”—the author augments his personal narrative with interviews with successful Black executives, journalists, activists, and others who also share their magic. Deray McKesson, one of the early leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, is buoyed by a “conviction in his belief that Black people deserve equality as a human right,” a belief he developed attending school in Baltimore County as a child and watching the pronounced racial inequality around him (“the first time I understood both Blackness and whiteness as cultural elements and not simply as skin tones”). Other relevant topics include Black duality, “to be palatable and included, especially in corporate worlds” and the trauma associated with hearing colleagues or even friends use the N-word. For example, Grayson Brown, vice president of finance and strategy at a tech startup, discusses how he was expelled from college after defending himself against a fraternity brother’s use of the racial slur. The varied origin stories of the contributors are fascinating and informative. Sanders concludes that surviving Blackness in this world summons “presence of mind, empathy, independent thinking, conviction, comfort in isolation, work ethic, resourcefulness, bravery, focus, leadership, perseverance, community, detachment, charisma, problem solving, and faith.” Even that magic won’t make racial inequity disappear—and the past four years, especially, have demonstrated the persistence of both White hostility and fragility—but these conversations offer fruitful avenues to pursue.
An engaging record of how Black pain and endurance can lead to Black excellence.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982104-22-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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