Review: Guelzo, Gettysburg (2013)

Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen C. Guelzo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an exhaustive blow-by-blow account of both sides of the battle of Gettysburg. It is intensely readable, and Guelzo writes about battle clearly and without romanticization. I admit I had a hard time keeping track of the cast of characters, and I ended up feeling like I should have been taking notes, but that's the result of the vast panorama Guelzo is trying to describe. He introduces people (okay, 99% men) deftly and with a keen eye for hidden agendas and reminded me again that nobody behaves more like a stereotypical middle school full of clique-ish teenage girls than the upper echelons of the 19th century military.

Guelzo is also very good at stopping when he comes to a point on which there's controversy, laying out both sides, and then making his own judgment, and the chapter at the end where he assesses the battle as a whole, both why it went the way it did and its significance in the Civil War, and greater significance in American history thanks in no small part to the Gettysburg Address, is really excellent.

If I hadn't had to give the book back to the library, I probably would have read it again.



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Review: Strand, Killer on the Road (2012)

Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate by Ginger Strand

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So this book is about interstate highways and serial killers and the horrible ways in which they combine. Reading it was acutely unpleasant, because Strand shows so clearly how the interstates got us to where we are today, in the collision of climate change and consumer capitalism, with urban sprawl and the ghetto-ization of minority communities, and all the other terrible effects the interstates have had on America and American culture. And, as Strand notices, the interstates and the serial killers spread hand in hand. She talks about Charles Starkweather, Ed Kemper, Wayne Williams (or the Atlanta child murders, since it looks pretty clear that Williams was not responsible for all of them, or even most of them), Roger Reece Kibbe and a bunch of other highway serial killers you've never heard of, the phenomenon of the long-haul trucker/serial killer, and she finishes by talking about Juarez and Mexican modernization and the creepy correlation between a nation's highways and its murders.

Strand suffers from the true crime writer's weird compulsion to distance herself from the people who are interested in her subject matter (true crime writers seem to believe that their audience's interest is low brow, vulgar, and vaguely distasteful, while their OWN interest is, you know, none of those things) and I caught her out on some minor factual things, but she writes well and deals with her material cogently. Her argument is both horrifying and persuasive.



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Review: Cappuzo, The Murder Room (2010)

The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World's Most Perplexing Cold Cases by Michael Capuzzo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not a very good book. The prose is frequently purple, the mood is hagiographic, and Capuzzo expects his readers to find Frank Bender---portrayed as a kind of wild priapic psychic man-child---as charming as he does.

Reader, I did not.

There's also this completely weird-ass thing with King Arthur and Capuzzo burbling about Joseph Campbell and the archetype (sorry, I think I need that in quotes, the "archetype") of the king, the knight, and the wizard, as if it maps onto the 3 founders of the Vidocq Society. It's a painful stretch, and as far as I'm concerned, he would have done better to check the mysticism at the door.

So this is a history of the Vidocq Society, which is a social club for elite detectives. They get together once a month for a gourmet lunch and a cold case, and in general help victims' families try to get justice. It's also a partial biography of the three men, Frank Bender, William Fleisher, and Richard Walter, who founded the Society. I found Capuzzo's attempts to bring his three principals to life annoying and would have preferred a far tighter focus on the cases and a less fancy, more chronological approach. He does a fine job of recounting the cold cases and the process by which the Society do or do not succeed in convicting the various murderers.

This book also felt, not necessarily misogynistic, but very man-focused. There ARE female members of the Vidocq Society, and a few of them even get speaking roles. Maybe it's just because he's focused so hard on Fleisher, Bender, and Walter, but I felt excluded from the text in a way that I don't usually, even in books with all, or almost all male casts. (I'm not saying that there should be more women in the book. I'm saying that it's possible to write about one gender without making the other genders feel unwelcome.) Maybe it's the archetype he's chosen, which certainly has no room for women in it.



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Review: Roach, Six Women

Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials by Marilynne K. Roach

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book approaches the Salem witchcraft crisis by following six women: Rebecca Nurse, Bridget Bishop, Mary English, Ann Putnam, Sr., Tituba, and Mary Warren. Nurse & Bishop were hanged for witchcraft; English escaped before her trial; Tituba arguably started the crisis with her confession (Elaine Breslaw argues this in Tituba: Reluctant Witch of Salem); Ann Putnam, Sr., was one of the people afflicted by witchcraft and the mother of one of the most outspoken of the afflicted in accusations; and Mary Warren started as afflicted, became a confessing witch, and then returned to being afflicted. So this method provides a good panorama of the crisis. The problem, of course, is that, because they're who they are (seventeenth century non-elite women) the records about them mostly exist only in the context of the witchcraft crisis. They certainly weren't the people keeping diaries, or at least none that has survived.

Roach approaches this problem by including fictionalized sections at the beginning and end of each chapter, taking each woman's point of view in turn. I'm going to confess that I did not read these sections, because I have a personal enmity toward "fictionalized" history. (Write history or write fiction. Write well-researched fiction by all means! But both genres are so wrapped up in storytelling, and they approach the idea of storytelling from such widely disparate angles, that I mistrust any attempt to combine them.) I didn't mind so much her speculations about how this or that woman must have felt, because I think that speculation is actually kind of justified: one of the big questions we in the 21st century have about the witchcraft crisis IS how various participants must have understood what they were doing---were they faking and HOW MUCH were they faking. It's hard not to see a very basic kind of bullying in the later throes of the crisis. People do things the afflicted don't like and immediately their specters show up and start biting. Any reprieve for one of the convicted witches meets with violent convulsion, until the reprieve is withdrawn. (There's a certain amount of moral cowardice in some of the men in power here.) Also, the practice that was starting of people coming to fetch the afflicted (Ann Putnam, Jr., in particular) to tell them what was wrong with their loved ones. There's a shift; they go from being afflicted to being, as Roach says, visionary. And again, we ask, how did they understand what they were doing? Roach can't answer that question, but she makes good observations about what we do know and extrapolates, I think not recklessly, about how, for instance, Mary Warren must have felt at seeing how people who tried to recant their confessions were treated by the magistrates. How she must have felt watching people she had accused be hanged.

This is not as good a book as Roach's monumental timeline of the witchcraft crisis, I think because it IS speculative. (This may indicate personal preferences on my part rather than objective quality.) But I think telling the whole thing from the perspectives of on-the-ground participants---the bottom-up kind of history, rather than the top-down---does do a great job of making the crisis vivid and, if not understandable, at least more relatable.



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Review: Wiehl & Rother, Hunting Charles Manson (2018)

Hunting Charles Manson: The Quest for Justice in the Days of Helter Skelter by Lis Wiehl

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not as good a book as either Bugliosi (Helter Skelter) or Guinn (Manson). Mostly it's a retread of the same ground, although Wiehl & Rother talk more about the aftermath of 1969 and what happened to all the various players, including tracking down two of Manson's biological sons (and a grandson, who apparently did MMA as "Charles Manson III"), and they seem to have talked to more people who befriended Manson AFTER '69 (I find it bizarre how many such people there are to be talked to), so they have more information about Manson's life between conviction and death. I would have liked more of the book to be about their research instead of just the brief "Sources and Methodology" note at the back; that might have made it easier to see the argument they're trying to make about possible narratives other than the one Bugliosi produced at trial.



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Review: Davis, ed., Touched by Fire

Touched by Fire: A National Historical Society Photographic Portrait of the Civil War by William C. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This calls itself a "photographic portrait" of the Civil War. Acres of photographs, arranged thematically, and terrible, terrible captions. The captions declare the Civil War to have been glorious, praise the heroes on both sides, wax sentimental about the soldier's life, and barely mention slavery at all. It's like the Civil War is a thing that doesn't need its origins talked about and that we can all celebrate unproblematically. (My feeling is that the Civil War is a monstrous thing, as all wars are monstrous, and we need to talk about its origins a lot.) The photographs, on the other hand, are stark rather than sentimental, and tell a rather different story than the captions.

Five stars for the photographs, two for the captions. Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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Review: Sears, Landscape Turned Red (1983)

Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephen W. Sears

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about the Battle of Antietam. It is not quite as good a book as Guelzo's Gettysburg (which is the same project with a different battle), but it is painstaking and clearly readable, and I like Sears' dry sense of humor about General McClellan. (McClellan is one of those people where you laugh or you scream.) It also, like Gettysburg, is a book that does not glorify or sentimentalize war.



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Review: Sanders, The Family, rev. ed. (2020)

The Family by Ed Sanders

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So this book is kind of weird. Which makes sense, since it's about the Manson Family, but it's also weird in other ways. The first part of the book (more than half) is a colloquially written history of the Family, up to and including the Tate-LaBianca murders, and is very good. Better than Bugliosi, who really doesn't WANT to try to understand the Family. But when it gets to the trials, Sanders himself becomes a person in the book instead of just a narrative voice, and I found that I didn't like him very much. He name-drops. He reminds you constantly of his counter-culture credentials, just how hip and happening a dude he is. And while I'm perfectly willing to be interested in an author's encounters with their subject, this was more a memoir of Sanders' experience of covering the Manson-Van Houten-Atkins-Krenwinkel trial, including all kinds of tangents, with which I became especially impatient when he got off onto the pornography tapes (of famous people) that may or may not have been in the Cielo Drive house the night Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent were killed. Sanders turns into a conspiracy theory chaser---he never actually finds a single tape, only talks to people who have talked to people who claim to have seen them. The only time he gets as close as talking to someone who claims to have actually seen the tapes themselves those persons (a.) are talking about tapes of the Manson Family, not the star-studded pornography (the various tapes tend to get conflated in Sanders' account), (b.) are woefully unreliable and untrustworthy and (c.) never produce the goods. I found it both not quite believable and a powerful waste of time. I was quite surprised when Sanders did not buy into the conspiracy theory that says the Family killed Ronald Hughes (van Houten's attorney), but he is sure---and convincing---that Hughes' death was an awful accident.

So this is an uneven book. (He also scorns Bugliosi's Helter Skelter theory without ever actually finding something to put in its place, only rumors and conspiracies.) When it's good, it's excellent; I do feel like I have a much better idea of how the Family happened. When it's bad, it's pedestrian and annoying.



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Review: Mellnick, Creepy Crawling (2018)

This is an excellent book of cultural analysis of Charles Manson and the Manson family, both in and of themselves and in the artistic work they have inspired. Melnick is very smart about things like the way the Manson "girls" are constructed, both the way they constructed themselves and the way they were constructed socially at the time and since then. Also, although he doesn't use the word "over-determined," he helped clarify for me that what Sanders and others are trying to do against Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter reading: not to propose a different motive, but to say that there were MULTIPLE motives. Melnick even points out that the various people who went out to commit murder may have had different ideas about what they were doing and why they were doing it. PART of it is Helter Skelter (why else would Patricia Krenwinkel write THAT, misspelled as "Healter Skelter," in blood on the LaBiancas' fridge?), part of it is to make the Hinman murder look like part of a series, so that Bobby Beausoleil could not be convicted (which, along with being a really BAD idea, was also a really stupid one, as events showed), and I'm gonna go ahead and say that part of it was that Charles Manson wanted some rich people to die as payback for the way Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson had seemed to welcome him in and then just as quickly welcomed him back out.

For me, Melnick was strongest and most useful when talking about the 1960s (the way Manson camouflaged himself as what the 60s meant by a "freak" and the ways that turned out to be like an alligator camouflaging itself as a floating log) and early 1970s (the performance of Vincent Bugliosi as "Vincent Bugliosi"), but I appreciate the way he followed the trail up to basically the publication of his book. There is a lot of Manson art out there, some of it the deliberate epater la bourgeoisie stuff that avant gardians like to do, some of it novels that engage with Manson in different ways (Emma Cline's The Girls, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, Madison Smartt Bell's The Color of Night ), hip hop sampling, John Waters' sculpture, Punisher comic books ... Melnick pursues his target through a kaleidoscope of American culture, and is smart and fun to read while he does it.

Review: Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995)

The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As you can kind of tell by the title, this is an academic book, recommended to me to a friend because one of the things going on in my current ms is, yes, the manufacture and sale of pornography. (I don't know how I got there, either.) This is a very good academic book, less about pornography per se than about how books on the forbidden list (which includes pornography, philosophy, and libelous (and frequently pornographic) biographies of Louis XV and his mistresses and ministers) circulated in France in the 1780s. One of the things that I found most fascinating was the way that pornography, philosophy, and libel/biography all swirled together into almost the same genre (the code for them was livres philosophiques), and I loved reading about the book publishers and booksellers colluding to get around the state censorship, not in any We are striking a blow for freedom! way, but just in that simple There is a market for these books! way.

Darnton shies away from coming to any conclusions about the relationship of these forbidden books to the Revolution, and while partly I agree with him that we cannot reconstruct the experience of reading in the 1780s well enough to know, I also feel that it left the book flapping feebly a bit at the end, which is a pity, because the earlier parts were so good.



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Review: Woodward & Bernstein, All the President's Men

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading this book in 2020 is a really horrifying experience, because everything Nixon and his goon squad were trying to do in the late 60s/early 70s is exactly what the ENTIRE GOP is trying to do now. "At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law." In the 1970s, the Republican Party stood up to Nixon when the truth started coming out and said, no, this is unacceptable. In 2020, they collude with Trump. It's like someone looked at Watergate and said, "The only thing wrong here is that you didn't try hard enough." Trump's BEEN CAUGHT, even, and the GOP closed ranks around him, and everything about 2020 is horrifying, but this makes it worse, because the things that looked horrifying in 1974 (coincidentally, the year I was born) look so goddamn TAME now.

Ahem.

Anyway.

This is Woodward and Bernstein's account of how they broke the Watergate story, piece by corrupt and malignant piece. It's well-enough written, even if it's very odd watching them talk about themselves in the third-person, and it is still an exciting story. There is something very satisfying about watching people who think they're above the law being brought to justice, even if Nixon himself slid away under that presidential pardon which he should NOT have gotten. Nobody can be above the law, or the law makes no sense. (There's this big problem in American history---and not exclusively American history, but let's stick with the U.S. for now---where the forces of good actually triumph over evil ... and then fall all over themselves to "put the past behind us" and return to "normal" as quickly as possible, because there are "good people on both sides." And so the forces of evil have taken a staggering blow, but are given the chance to reset and regroup and just keep going. It's what happened in 1865 and it's what happened in 1974, and I am so goddamn tired of seeing forgiveness granted to people who have not earned it and major faultlines in American discourse simply papered over and left alone to ferment in the dark so that they can come back stronger than ever.)

Sorry, this is making me very polemical, and I'm mixing my metaphors something fierce.

The book is also interesting for its snapshot of how Washington, D.C., journalism was conducted in 1972-4. I'm going to guess it looks pretty different now. (Another thing we can thank Nixon for: the delegitimazation of the news media. Does anyone even talk about "the free press" anymore?) D.C. is very much a boys' club, where everybody on both sides of the press/politician line knows each other and talks to each other and has lunch with each other. (There is one woman in power in this book, the owner of the Washington Post. All the other women are wives and secretaries. People of color are also mostly invisible.) Everybody knows everybody else, and one of the things you can seen Nixon destroying is that understanding that all three sides (Democrats, Republicans, and the press) are doing their jobs and all three sides can be counted on to play by a set of unspoken ethical rules. (Nixon laughs and runs the rules through the shredder.) I'm not a fan of the boys' club approach, but I did like the feeling that everybody involved was being professional, and that being professional involved NOT using every dirty trick you could think of to get ahead. (Which is not to say that politics pre-Nixon was some sort of utopia, just that there was something there for him to destroy---as everyone's sincerely horrified reaction to the truth about Watergate shows.)

So mostly this book left me really sad that everything accomplished by the Watergate proceedings just got walked back, and that now the way Nixon was playing the game has become accepted practice for the GOP, and there's no longer any kind of moral consensus across party lines that some things are actually beyond the pale. (Like Trump's entire political career.)

There's a pendulum of corruption and reform in American politics. We've been swinging toward corruption for an awfully long time now, and I pray that 2020 is the year we start to swing back.



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Review: Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (1998)

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the story of James Murray and W. C. Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary. It's well-written and engaging, although it felt a little facile at times, and the story is fascinating, both the story of the OED itself and the story of W. C. Minor, who was an American doctor who served with the Union in the Civil War and then began, possibly as a result, to go mad. He traveled to England, where his paranoia caused him to shoot and kill an innocent man. He was sent to Broadmoor, where he was made comfortable and allowed to have his books and where somehow he heard about the mammoth undertaking that was the Oxford English Dictionary and instantly desired to be a part of it. The acres of time he had on his hands (plus his already extant fascination with books of the 17th century) made him a peculiarly useful volunteer for the OED, and he was one of their top contributors for 20 years. (It took 70 for the OED to be even provisionally finished.) At the end of his life, he was allowed to return to America, but remained hospitalized as what we would now call a paranoid schizophrenic until he died in 1920.



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Review: DiAngelo, White Fragility (2018)

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about why white people, as an aggregate, are so bad at talking about race. The answer, which I think DiAngelo (a white woman) proves very handily, is that it is so greatly to our advantage to shut down discussions of race that we have a whole laundry list of strategies (from defensiveness to anger to tears to the utterly nonsensical claim of "reverse racism") that we aren't even consciously aware of to get us out of admitting that racism (a) exists and (b) works exclusively in OUR favor. This is an excellent book for forcing white people to THINK about their reactions, and hopefully to change them.



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Review: Reiterman, Raven (1982)

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a massive biography of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. (Yes, "Peoples Temple" is correct. No apostrophe, no definite article.) Reiterman was one of the reporters who went with Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown, which was the precipitating incident for the mass murder-suicide that, tragically, made Jonestown famous. So Reiterman actually MET Jim Jones and was nearly killed by his followers, which gives the biography a certain authority.

Reiterman has also done his homework through interviews and FOIA and digging in newspaper archives, so really presents the best and most rounded picture possible of a secretive paranoid megalomaniac.

I find Jim Jones fascinating in a trainwreck sort of way, because his ideals seem to have been genuine---he DID work for racial equality, although PT itself reinscribed the same old racial hierarchy, and he did passionately believe in socialism (which for me counts in the plus column when it's practical boots on the ground everybody-has-enough-food-and-a-place-to-sleep socialism)---and yet he is one of the most evil people of the 20th century. He twisted everything he touched---and was doing so basically from the beginning of his career as a preacher---until it turned into the horrifically egalitarian massacre at Jonestown. The people who committed the murders followed through and killed themselves. SOMEONE killed Jim Jones, which Reiterman speculates was not his actual plan. Jones talked about mass suicide a lot before he made it happen, and he always said that someone had to stay alive to explain, and who better than Jones himself? And there are some weird things about what he did at the end---sending a couple of guys off with briefcases full of money and guns, his murderous goons leaving the Cessna untouched although they shot out one of the engines of the larger plane (Jones had at least one person in his inner circle who could fly a Cessna), and although Jones died of a contact gunshot wound to the temple, the gun was found twenty feet away from his body, as if someone else made sure he carried through with the master plan.

That's one of the many unknowable things about Jonestown, including exactly how many people died and who they were. The US government and the legal system did a terrible job with the aftermath: "The authors had intended to include a complete list of the Jonestown dead but discovered that no such roster had been compiled. A list supplied by the court-appointed Peoples Temple receiver in February 1982 contained only 883 names---those 660 people whose bodies were positively identified and 223 who were presumed to have died at Jonestown. Receiver Robert Fabian said there was no way to account for the other 30 bodies found at Jonestown but suggested that many were children who had been born there. The authors decided against using the list, however, because it contained many omissions, some inaccurate entries, and other errors in the case of adult membership" (592).

The massacre at Jonestown is horrific and tragic all on its own, but it's also a sad fact that it eclipses the good that Peoples Temple did. The evil in Jim Jones ultimately overwhelmed the good.

This is a good, solidly written biography. Reiterman does his best to explain the unexplainable.



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Review: Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an autobiography, written as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son, talking about how dangerous and damaging racism is to the literal, physical bodies of Black people. He is talking especially about Black men, especially YOUNG Black men, the specific group into which his son is emerging and who disproportionately end up incarcerated or dead. He's also talking about the toxic nature of the American Dream, which silently reinscribes racism in the way that it lets one side of the equation (white people) simply ignore the existence of the other side (Black people) as they strive selfishly toward an implicitly white-only utopia. (Black people have no such luxury about white people.) The Dream is the thing that white fragility (cf. Robin diAngelo) is there to protect, the unspeakably privileged ability NOT TO KNOW.

This is beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking.



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Review: Arntfield & Danesi, Murder in Plain English (2017)

Murder in Plain English: From Manifestos to Memes--Looking at Murder Through the Words of Killers by Michael Arntfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not a very good book, which is disappointing, because the idea---that murderers (by which they mostly mean serial killers and mass murderers) have particular stories they tell about themselves and that those stories can be analyzed to tell us more about how murderers think---is great. (I love close readings.) Unfortunately, Arntfield & Danesi aren't very nuanced readers, and they never really get in there and close read a text the way I was longing for them to do. I think the points they make about the possibilities of literary forensics are intriguing, although there's a creepy Philip K. Dick/Minority Report vibe to their idea that murderers can be detected by their writing BEFORE they commit murder. To be fair to Arntfield & Danesi, I think what they mean is that people (mostly male) likely to become serial killers or mass murderers can be detected in adolescence (by teachers who magically have the time and training to close read their students' work for signs of schizoid or other personality disorders) and (magically) successfully intervened with by social workers or psychiatrists, not that they should be pre-emptively incarcerated.

In the last chapter they try to prove that literary forensics is useful in cold cases, but in none of the cases they look at (O.J. Simpson, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and April Tinsley) does their analysis of the writing involved get us any closer to justice. Their close reading of Simpson is sort of nice as corroborative evidence, but it's nothing new or surprising. They point sort of vaguely at Patsy Ramsey as being involved somehow in the ransom letter, but it's very vague and of course she's dead. And their not-very-close close reading of April Tinsley's murderer accomplishes nothing.* (Interestingly, in that case, the only case where they have made any effort to get involved in actually SOLVING a crime, the information they give the Fort Wayne police---to which the Fort Wayne police do not respond---is geographical profiling, which they do not talk about at all in the entire rest of the book, not literary analysis. So they're severely undercutting their own argument.)

In summation, this feels like a case of academic scholars trying to join the bandwagon of unlikely specialties that turn out be forensically useful and trying to prove that they have special skills that are uniquely suited to solving---or preventing---crimes. On the one hand, people have been close reading the writings of murderers for decades, even if they don't call it that, so there's nothing really new here, and on the other, their argument for the unique suitability of trained literary scholars to fight crime is unconvincing.

---
*In 2018 a man named John Miller was successfully prosecuted for April Tinsley's murder, but he was caught by genetic genealogy and DNA profiling, not by literary analysis of his writing.



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Review: Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Does what it says on the tin. Kendi, like Coates using his autobiography as a platform to build off of, goes through patiently, step by step and aspect by aspect and using himself and his own attitudes as an example, how to turn racism (or its passive twin I'm-not-a-racist) into antiracism, at every decision point reiterating that racist policies arise out of self-interest rather than ignorance, and it's the racist POLICIES that have to change, because it's policy that drives social change, not individual enlightenment

Kendi is very clear about defining his terms; racism is anything that promotes inequity between racial groups; antiracism is anything that promotes equity between racial groups. He talks about class racism and gender racism and queer racism, places where racism intersects with classism, sexism, and homophobia, and in fact, following Black feminist theory, argues that the various -isms can't be separated out one from the other: that's a divide-and-conquer strategy that works well for racist power and is disastrous for antiracist power. Everyone's identity sits at the intersection of race and class and sex and sexual orientation; you can't treat one if you don't consider the others.

This book starts from Kendi's personal journey, but his belief that change must come at the level of policy means that it is always looking outward toward social change and how social change can be achieved. Autobiography as extremely well argued polemic.



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