This fourth book by Dyson (Between God and Gangsta Rap, 1995, etc.) is a collection of interlocking essays pondering the ongoing dilemmas of race, class, and gender in the African-American community. ``Why another book on race?'' Dyson asks at the outset. He answers, ``Because we haven't learned our lessons.'' The seven chapters of his latest offering trace a complex line through the race/gender/class nexus, from the O.J. Simpson trial through the Million Man March, with thoughtful considerations of the nature of black male leadership, the need for a black Christian theology of sexuality, the role of black public intellectuals, and the intergenerational split within black America. At the heart of the book is the useful distinction that Dyson charts between race as context, as subtext, and as pretext. In practical terms, most effectively in his essay on male leadership, this trilogy is expressed as the difference between Colin Powell as one whose appeal is based on transcending race, Louis Farrakhan as one who has translated race, and Jesse Jackson as a leader who has transformed race. This last model is the one that Dyson forcefully valorizes, a leadership style that acknowledges the powerful wrongs of white supremacy but seeks to make common cause with others oppressed by sexism, homophobia, class and economic divisions. Dyson is himself a Baptist minister, and he shares the traditionalist framework that unites all three of his exemplars of black male leadership, but as his powerful chapter on sexuality and the black church indicates, he is not locked into a reactionary vision of gender and sexuality. On the downside, Dyson occasionally engages in too much on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand analysis; what is clearly an honest search for the truth occasionally reads like the temporizing of a politician seeking to appease all the voters. Despite its occasional shortcomings, a thoughtful and balanced addition to a national debate all too often marked by outraged polemic. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-91186-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
