Review by New York Times Review
WHITE RAGE: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by Carol Anderson. (Bloomsbury, $17.) In 2014, as protests erupted in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown, Anderson wrote about the white backlash to black progress. She expands her argument to include tensions stretching back to the Civil War, times when white rage thwarted efforts toward democracy and a semblance of racial equality. SWING TIME, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, $17.) Two girls in Northwest London forge a close, complicated friendship in their dance class, where they are the only "brown girls"; they rely on one another to navigate a swirl of issues surrounding class, race and politics. Years later, their relationship has ruptured but still forms the emotional core of the novel, which brims with "cadenced digressions and lyrical love letters" to dance and London itself, Holly Bass wrote here. BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. (Picador, $16.) Gawande, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a surgeon, examines various models of living for older people, from multigenerational homes to hospice care, and outlines a case for a paradigm shift among medical professionals: Doctors should expand their focus from treating and curing disease to improving well-being and end-of-life care. THE SENILITY OF VLADIMIR R, by Michael Honig. (Pegasus, $15.95.) A novel imagines President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in decline: retired, sidelined by dementia and tended to by a cast of aides. His nurse, Nikolai, an unfailingly scrupulous man, is naive about Russia's corruption, until his nephew becomes embroiled in a scandal - exacerbated by Nikolai's proximity to Vladimir. As our reviewer, Boris Fishman, wrote, "this is an author who understands the grotesque reality of a place where the honest man is the coward." LABOR OF LOVE: The Invention of Dating, by Moira Weigel. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16.) After a heartbreak, Weigel set out to investigate the history of courtship in the United States and the romantic dissatisfaction and unbalanced gender roles it perpetuates. Weigel adroitly draws on pop culture and history - from reality TV to the self-help industry - as evidence, though her scope is largely limited to straight couples. HOW TO PARTY WITH AN INFANT, by Kaui Hart Hemmings. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) With her personal life in turmoil, Mele Bart, a single mother in San Francisco, looks to a local cookbook competition as a distraction. There, she finds solace and strength in a band of other hilarious and misfit parents, who help temper the absurdities of raising children in a hypercompetitive and status-obsessed community.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 represented for many the transition of the U.S. into a post-racial nation. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston shootings, continued episodes of police violence, and repressive voter registration laws signifying the continuation of historical tendencies, however, critical issues once thought closed are now just as alive as ever. In this engaging, thought-provoking work, Anderson (Eyes off the Prize, 2003) argues that what is really at work in America is a white rage. This rage is characterized by an epistemic violence working through the courts, legislature, and government bureaucracies and triggered by black advancement. Anderson examines this larger trend, from the close of the American Civil War to the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement to the current, contentious debates. Anderson's clear, ardent prose detailing the undermining of America's stated ideals and democratic norms is required reading for anyone interested in the state of American social discourse.--Odom, Brian Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Fitting together historical flash points from the aftermath of the Civil War to the current Black Lives Matter movement, historian Anderson (African American studies, Emory Univ.; Bourgeois Radicals) displays how public policies have systematically discarded all attempts at a colorblind U.S. democracy. The author shows how whites have passionately refused to budge from positions of privilege, thwarting at every turn black advances toward equal rights and economic opportunity. Indeed, she illustrates how white rage has persistently undercut progress among African Americans. For example, by closing down public schools and then abandoning public education systems, she notes, white reaction sabotaged the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education mandate for equal rather than separate public education. The author further exposes white rage as national; not regional, as she recounts -Northern and Midwestern opposition to the Great Migration of the 1900s and describes mass black incarceration, decimated central cities, defunded and dysfunctional institutions, and even the vitriol heaped on President Barack Obama. VERDICT Anderson's mosaic of white outrage deserves contemplation by anyone interested in understanding U.S. race relations, past and present.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A close reading of America's racial chasm.In the wake of what were often termed the Ferguson riots, Anderson (African American Studies/Emory Univ.; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, 2014, etc.) wrote an opinion column for the Washington Post with the headline, "Ferguson isn't about black rage against cops. It's white rage against progress." Here, she extends her argument, showing how any signs of black rage might be more than justified in the face of decades of white intolerance, indifference, and obstruction. The author provides a perspective dating back to the Civil War, charging that the victory outlawing slavery failed during Reconstruction, which shifted terms without significantly improving the plight of the former slaves. "Indeed, for all the saintedness of his legacy as The Great Emancipator," she writes, "Lincoln himself had neither the clarity, humanity, nor resolve necessary to fix what was so fundamentally broken. Nor did his successor." Most of what Anderson traces in this compact study offers more summary than revelation, and while it does testify to the dehumanizing effects of white power and prejudice, the "white rage" of the title seems more like a rebalancing of the scales than a precise description. As she writes in the wake of Ferguson, "framing the discussion, dominating it, in fact, was an overwhelming focus on black ragewhich, it seemed to me, entirely missed the point." Yet the book builds to an emotional climax that justifies its title, as the election of the nation's first black president brought such intensity to the nation's fissures: "the vitriol heaped on Obama was simply unprecedented," and the "hatred started early." By the epilogue, Anderson's analysis seems prescient. "Not even a full month after Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans," she writes, "Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, fired up his silent majority'with a macabre promise: Don't worry, we'll take our country back.' " A book that provides necessary perspective on the racial conflagrations in the U.S. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
