An impressive, intimate, inclusive, truth-telling treasure.
Essays on shame and vulnerability from a diverse array of Black thinkers.
“White supremacy,” writes co-editor Burke, “has added another layer to the kind of shame [Black people] have to deal with, and the kind of resilience we have to build, and the kind of vulnerability that we are constantly subjected to whether we choose it or not.” Burke teams up with researcher and bestselling author Brown in a collection of 20 essays by Burke, actor Laverne Cox, scholar Imani Perry, writers Kiese Laymon and Jason Reynolds, and a host of educators, artists, activists, and other thought leaders who explore the Black experience with shame resilience and vulnerability. They frame the issues through a variety of lenses, including mental illness, masculinity, religion, disability, addiction, queer identity, academia, and grief. In a stunning essay among many standouts, Sonya Renee Taylor writes, “My mommy was dead in every city of every nation on the planet and that truth bulldozed me.” Fittingly, the title of this extraordinary collection is derived from a line from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel about the nature of freedom and the reclamation of self. Tanya Denise Fields, founder and executive director of the Black Feminist Project, deconstructs the shame she felt as a victim of intimate partner violence, and Reynolds reckons with a shameful moment in his relationship with his beloved mother. Austin Channing Brown writes about “foreboding joy” and the moment she saw her toddler son’s reflection in the mirror; he was wearing a hoodie and looked like a tiny Trayvon Martin. Penned by a refreshing blend of well-known and lesser-known contributors, these compact, deeply reflective essays pack emotional punches usually found only in full-length memoir. The writers powerfully articulate not only their challenges, but also their hope, resilience, and practical wisdom.
An impressive, intimate, inclusive, truth-telling treasure.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-24362-6
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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