Publishers Weekly
06/27/2022
This blistering survey of racial inequality in America begins by deploring the “assault on the machinery of our democracy” launched by President Trump and his supporters in the wake of the 2020 election. However, contends journalist Cose (The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America), Trump “is only a man,” and his path to the presidency was paved by centuries of racism, exploitation, and discrimination. Spotlighting efforts by white Americans to preserve their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by denying those same rights to people of African, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous descent, Cose briskly recounts the Trail of Tears, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the ransacking of East St. Louis by white mobs in 1917, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit Riots” in 1943 Los Angeles. He argues that these and other episodes of racial violence and intolerance reveal the existence of a “belligerent minority that believes its self-selected rights are the only rights that matter,” and lucidly explains how the Electoral College, the filibuster, and voter suppression work to undermine the popular will and thwart racial equality. Much of this will be familiar to readers of American history and politics, but Cose draws incisive parallels between past and present. This is a pointed rebuke of American exceptionalism. (July)
From the Publisher
A book that merits a place on ethnic studies—and American history—curricula.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Blistering. . . . Cose draws incisive parallels between past and present. This is a pointed rebuke of American exceptionalism.” — Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
02/01/2022
In Race and Reckoning, Cose (The Rage of a Privileged Class) argues that throughout U.S. history racial bias has always shaped key decisions and events (25,000-copy first printing). Ten years in the making, journalist Fairbanks's The Inheritors follows three everyday South Africans over five decades to reveal how the end of apartheid unfolded. From Hager, historian-in-residence at the Presidential Pet Museum, All-American Dogs is organized by historical era to chronicle the 31 U.S. presidents who have kept canines within petting distance at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (100,000-copy first printing; four-color illustrations). Ranging from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, Livingstone reveals the manifold accomplishments of The Women of Rothschild (40,000-copy first printing). In Code Gray, ER physician Nahvi highlights the daily ethical questions faced by doctors in his position (50,000-copy first printing). In Nerd, New York Times critic at large Phillips, who writes about theater and poetry as well as film, shows how pop-culture fan favorites from Star Wars to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Doctor Who have shaped her—and have much to tell us about society at large (50,000-copy first printing). A multi-award-winning British author who specializes in French history and culture—his biographies of Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac were all New York Times Best Books—Robb now gives us France from Gaulish times 'til COVID-19. Journalist-turned-money manager Steinmetz (The Richest Man Who Ever Lived) introduces us to an American Rascal—Jay Gould, richer than Rockefeller or even Croesus and the reason Wall Street's first financial reforms were instituted (50,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling science writer Yong reveals how animals other than humans perceive their surroundings in An Immense World.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-05-05
A survey of ethnic relations in America that links past and present injustices.
“To understand the current efforts to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters,” writes Cose, “you have to understand what happened at the end of Reconstruction.” The end of Reconstruction returned White conservative Southerners to power and introduced an era of Jim Crow laws that seem all too current today. At stake, notes the author, is the vision of an American nation made up of equals as opposed to one in which only some Americans are entitled to the benefits of citizenship, including voting rights. Cose begins at Jamestown and the introduction of African slavery to the American Colonies, showing how the enslavement of Blacks and the removal of Native Americans from their homelands were conjoined efforts to secure White supremacy. Every state was once complicit, given the requirements of such laws as the Fugitive Slave Act, which Cose examines through the lens of the real-life case that inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved—a book, he reminds us, that figured in a campaign ad for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as one to be banned in public schools. In many cases, Blacks enslaved before the Civil War became enslaved in practice, if not in name, afterward even as immigration officials tried to sort out other racial classifications. One such official, reported the Washington Post, held that “Syrians and their racial kindred…were yellow, not white, and that they were barred therefore from naturalization.” In the face of civil rights advances after World War II, racism is growing today through social media and dog whistlers such as Donald Trump, whom Cose links to a eugenicist from the previous century who complained that Latin American countries “furnish very undesirable immigrants.” The author ends with a well-reasoned defense for teaching this history against those who “doggedly refuse to acknowledge how our past affects our present.”
A book that merits a place on ethnic studies—and American history—curricula.
