The companion to a forthcoming PBS series (to air in October) exploring how slavery shaped America combines revisionist history and historical fiction with mixed results. Like its predecessor, Eyes on the Prize, Africans in America documents an important chapter in the nation’s history by focusing on personal stories. The sprawling account starts with the advent of the European slave trade and the arrival of the first African slaves a full year before the Mayflower; it ends with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The narrative approach of the text (written by award-winning but controversial former Boston Globe columnist Smith, and researched by WGBH television under the auspices of all-star scholars like Henry Louis Gates and Leon Litwack) has its strengths and drawbacks. Under-reported aspects of slavery—how tribal rivalries predisposed Africans toward profiting from the enslavement of fellow countrymen, for example—are brought into the light. So are lesser-known figures like Phillis Wheatley, the first black American to publish a book of poetry, and Anthony Johnson, a black indentured servant who became a prominent 17th-century landowner. It admirably credits individual contributions but glosses over huge events: the Civil War gets a page, the contribution of black soldiers a paragraph. Far better is the account of blacks’ huge role on both sides in the Revolutionary War, when former slaves like Colonel Tye led raids to free slaves and provision the British. Most disappointing is the contribution of MacArthur-winning novelist Charles Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990). His slight fictional sketches interrupt Smith’s narrative, elaborating (often redundantly) facts and situations raised by her “to conjure a moment in time with feeling.” Johnson’s narrative gimmicks include a letter, a newspaper article, and a first-person account by Martha Washington of her fear after the death of George, who gave his slaves compelling reason to kill Martha by tying their freedom to her death. Despite many fine parts, this is ultimately more a cheerleading revisionist textbook than a rigorous scholarly history. (60 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100339-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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