Clear, revealing commentary on Black America’s literary achievements.
A survey of Black writers’ self-definitions.
Renowned literary critic and historian Gates, author of Stony the Road and The Black Church, presents a brief survey of African American literature, with a focus on the search for liberatory conceptions of identity. His title plays on the metaphor of a black box to understand how Black writers have struggled to reconceive their confinement within hostile power structures and dispel a sense of Black inscrutability. The author seeks to understand “both the nature of the discursive world that people of African descent have created in this country…and how this very world has been ‘seen’ and ‘not seen’ from outside of it, by people unable to fathom its workings inside.” Gates provides astute analysis of canonical figures, including Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. He includes a distillation of his own decades-long scholarship on subversive strategies deployed in Black writing, vividly demonstrating how literature has played a crucial role in winning sociopolitical and imaginative, artistic freedom. We gain a memorable sense of how particular literary works contributed to abolition and quests for civil rights, the debunking of racist discourses, and the gradual formation of “a shared history, a shared culture.” A consistent strength of the book is Gates’ incisive descriptions of the debates arising from efforts to define personal and collective identities and chart paths to freedom. The author argues against any monolithic definition of Blackness and affirms an “irreducible” multiplicity of identities. “There are as many ways of being Black as there are Black people,” he writes. In his conclusion, Gates connects the historical trajectory of Black writing to contemporary struggles, such as the ongoing debates across the nation about school curricula and the teaching of Black history.
Clear, revealing commentary on Black America’s literary achievements.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593299784
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.
The Top Chef host describes her journey to new heights.
For those who don’t know, Kish is a “gay Korean adopted woman, born in Seoul, raised in Michigan” and “a chef, a character, a host, and a cultural communicator—as well as a human being with a beating heart.” Though this book covers every step of her journey, every restaurant job and television role, and also discusses her experience as an adoptee (very positive) and a queer woman (late bloomer), the storytelling is so straightforward, lacking in suspense, character development, or dialogue, that it is basically a long version of its (longish) “About the Author.” Seemingly dramatic situations are not dramatized—when she was eliminated on her first Top Chef run, she assures us that she did the best she could, and drops it. “I can spare you the gory details (bouillabaisse and big personalities were involved).” Later, she cites a belief in protecting the privacy of others to omit the story of her first relationship with a woman. With no character development, neither does the reader get to know those who fall outside the privacy zone, like her best friend, Steph, and her wife, Bianca. When she gets mad, she says things like, “It’s a gross understatement to say I was crushed, beyond frustrated, and furious with the situation.” The fact that “I’ve never been a big reader” does not come as a surprise. It is more surprising when she confesses that “I believe the universe is selective about the moments in which it introduces life-changing prospects.”
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780316580915
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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