A powerful case for independent thought.
Kavanagh explores the hazards of blind allegiance to political and religious ideologies in this nonfiction debut.
Born into a conservative Irish Catholic home, the author was taught (or in his words, “indoctrinated”) to simply accept the family’s religious faith without question. At the time, he found comfort in his unbridled loyalty to this belief system, which not only provided cut-and-dried answers to the complexities of life and death, but also promised its adherents that their “status and identity would be raised to new heights.” Yet an off-putting experience during confession (related to the sin of eating meat on a Friday), combined with contradictory messages from Church leadership, prompted Kavanagh to question his faith as a teenager. Later, during a college visit to Yale (where he would eventually earn a degree), the author was introduced to the scholarship on genocide, learning of the interwoven histories of ideological movements and extreme violence. With a subsequent graduate degree from Columbia University, and as the CEO of Market Corporation of America, Kavanagh draws on his own personal experiences and solid grasp of world history to make his case against ideological extremism. The book begins with an interdisciplinary look at the psychological attraction of ideologies across the political and religious spectrums, emphasizing how they offer adherents the “the promise of a better life or better world,” ease anxieties, and provide access to social groups that “give meaning to their lives.” He goes on to examine how power-hungry leaders have exploited ideologies for their own ends and the roles of ideologies in fostering some of history’s grimmest examples of brutality.
The strength of the book lies in its critique of extremism on all sides. In surveying the popularity of Donald Trump, for instance, Kavanagh discusses the corrosive aspects of Christian Nationalism on American democracy, from targeting reproductive rights to the marginalization of immigrants, non-Christians, and others deemed “second class citizens.” Alternately, the author details the failures of Leftist movements in providing promised utopias, noting the death tolls associated with the killing fields of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Great Famine and Cultural Revolution in China. Indeed, per Kavanagh’s convincing historical narrative, nearly all of the world’s worst atrocities—from transatlantic slavery to the Holocaust—have ideological roots. Making the case against “absolutism” (which the book defines as “The Refuge of Small Minds”), the author urges readers to question the ideological fallacies that they may blindly embrace and offers pragmatic advice for “developing well-grounded, bottoms-up belief systems” based on openness, high standards of evidence, research, and intellectual honesty. Writing explicitly for a general audience, Kavanagh here aims to provide “ordinary people” with a path toward ideological freedom. His accessible writing style is backed by a solid grasp of the relevant academic literature—the text is accompanied by two dozen pages of endnotes and bibliographic citations. While at times a bit reductionist in its terminology (for instance, using simplistic definitions of “Evangelical Christianity” that ignore the vibrant history of America’s Black churches in defying their white counterparts), the book otherwise mounts a powerful argument against extremism on all sides. A useful appendix offers readers a systematic timeline of “Mass Killing[s] By Ideology,” providing thorough documentation of ideological violence associated with imperialism, racism, religious fanaticism, and other scurrilous ideas.
A powerful case for independent thought.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798339528289
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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