Subtitled- A Report on the Bandung Conference — this is a more important book than this would seem to indicate. Perhaps because the Bandung Conference, the first meeting of the 29 free and independent nations of Asia and Africa, received less attention in the Western Press than it rated, a book on the impressions received by Richard Wright in attending this conference might also be slighted. Actually, Wright sees this as "the last call of westernized Asians to the moral conscience of the West". One feels the reason for his conclusion in reading this analysis of the mood of the participants; one recognizes the challenge in his realization that if the West does not meet the demand, Communist China alone has the desire and the experience to accept the challenge. The opening speeches were inflammatory, without exception, reflected the antagonism towards the erstwhile colonial powers. But the Bandung communique was extraordinarily moderate in its tone, stressing economic cooperation, with all its sacrifice on the part of the West; calling for a revitalizing of Asian and African cultures and religions; endorsing the principles of human rights and self-determination; asking for an end to surviving colonialism; requesting greater participation in the Security Council of the United Nations. Wright thinks the chances of implementing the contents of the communique are good- but that the problems are vastly greater than indicated. But is there TIME? How shall 65% of the human race be organized? The Communists of China know the magnitude of the problem. Will the West take the means, techniques and time? Religion and Race impressed Wright as the controlling factors. A personal approach- this; but a book that needs to be pondered.
Pub Date: March 19, 1956
ISBN: 087805748X
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1956
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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