Inspiring, though not as inspiring as actually hearing Barber at the mic.
A collection of Christianly-inflected calls for social justice.
The heart of this book is a batch of speeches and sermons by activist and minister Barber (The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear, 2016), the president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. Calling for a “moral movement…rooted in the constitutional and sacred values of compassion, empathy, and courageous dedication to the common good,” he advocates for a living wage, denounces “apartheid redistricting” and the Supreme Court’s attacks on voting rights, demands quality public education and accessible health care, criticizes the death penalty, and insists that “it’s time for America to have a grown-up conversation about race.” Barber grounds his arguments in Scripture—in particular, the Hebrew prophets—and the Constitution. For example, he notes that the First Amendment gives Americans the right to disagree about topics like LGBTQ rights, but the 14th Amendment means that we cannot “enact laws that, because of our religious or private conviction, remove equal protection of the law from any citizen.” Often, Barber’s stirring rhetoric—his use of anaphora, his skillful interweaving of academic research with folksy quotes from his grandmother—radiates off the page. Each of the author’s addresses is followed by a response from a friend or colleague: Environmentalist Karenna Gore riffs on Barber’s call for action on climate change; peace activist Jodie Evans comments on his denunciations of Islamophobia; historian Timothy Tyson locates Barber in the traditions of Afro-Christianity and the blues. A few of the other contributions feel like padding. In early, clunky chapters, Lowery and Theoharis ploddingly argue that the biblical God cared about liberation and the biblical writers cared about the poor. Martin Luther King Jr. might be considered another contributor, given how frequently Barber invokes him.
Inspiring, though not as inspiring as actually hearing Barber at the mic.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2560-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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