Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 46

The Failure of Disney’s New Snow White

Children’s media creators are not just benevolent spinners of yarns—they are business owners, media executives, and freelance creatives. The need to turn a profit has long lived in harmony with the need to create high-quality content. But Disney, unfortunately, has begun to view quality as superfluous. Their live-action remakes are thinly-veiled cash grabs that lazily recycle old content and direct viewers to endless scores of merchandise with little creative energy required.

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How Black Americans Became Imposters of Blackness

By Gerald Early

The Affirmative Action Myth is, in essence, a defense of a golden age of Black bourgeois culture, Black bourgeois morality, Black bourgeois striving, indeed, Black bourgeois reality. And being bourgeois here is not about a class, but an aspiration. Riley’s book is an account of how Black people made themselves American. And why not? America is the land of self-invention.

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Villain or Visionary: How Great was Herod?

By Gerald Early

Martin Goodman absolves Herod of the murder of the innocents in the hunt for the baby messiah Jesus. He thinks Herod was likely dead when Jesus was born. Herod probably did not kill the Jewish innocents but what is unsettling about the man, his indomitable will, his swagger, and his ferocious “statecraft” is that he was probably, at that stage in his life, quite capable of ordering it done.

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When Worlds Collide, or Not

By Ben Fulton

Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out in their book A City on Mars, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.

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The Larger-Than-Life Black Football Coach Changes the World

By Courtney M. Cox

Critics of Coach Prime often accuse him of providing all glitter with no game plan, but in its most decisive moments, Jean-Jacques Taylor’s book holds space for both the intentionality behind Deion Sanders’s decisions and the pomp and circumstance when the lights are bright.

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Still Can’t Find What I’m Looking For

By Matthew Shipe

A preacherly ambition propels Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, as the book chronicles U2’s forty-odd-year career, and the book’s impact hinges on your openness to Bono’s expansiveness.

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Revolution and Its Limits

By Randal Maurice Jelks

Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is thought-provoking, well-written, and historically informative. It raises so many questions for activists and theorists in a reconsideration of Frantz Fanon.

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The Gipper and His Gallop Through History

By Claude R. Marx

The Reagan Renaissance will no doubt be helped by Max Boot’s thorough, engaging, and balanced new biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend. Although the book is 736 pages, it rarely drags and while the author admires his subject, he is not blind to Reagan’s faults.

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Deep in the Heart of Texas

By Seth S. Tannenbaum

In The Sports Revolution, Columbia University history professor Frank Andre Guridy intervenes in this conversation by demonstrating that “Texas was central to the nation’s expanding political, economic, and emotional investment in sport.”

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The Journey of the Black Scholar as Ideological Terminator

By Gerald Early

What makes Late Admissions so fascinating to read, and such an important autobiography, is its self-awareness: it is actually a story about how embracing one’s self-destructive tendencies, one’s voracious selfishness and appetites, gives life meaning because, if nothing else, they make life interesting to oneself and they actually make you interesting to other people. It is a book about the ferocity of self-regard.

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