Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Voisin (Univ. of Toronto, Canada) has written a robust and captivating book detailing the impacts of neighborhood violence on the lives of impoverished black youth. Resisting the tendency to overgeneralize the behavior of black adolescents, he addresses the complex historical and structural forces that have created the conditions of the inner city, dating back to American chattel slavery and Jim Crow laws, up to the war on drugs. Voisin incorporates both survey and qualitative data to provide an intimate picture of what life is like for black families in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago. The data reveal it is no coincidence that high levels of neighborhood violence coexist with high incidences of substance abuse and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Indeed, the continuous trauma associated with living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence is related to both higher levels of aggression and riskier behavior. Voisin provides policy and mental health recommendations to address these disparities, and reflects on his position as an academician engaging with these issues. The book is excellent in its overview of the problems at hand and the ways to address them.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Patterson (Georgetown Univ.) has gathered an impressive array of scholars to meditate on black cultural productions in the 1970s and their influence on political movements and cultural engagements of the time. The essays collected in this title survey a wide range of authors and filmmakers, connecting their works to the Black Power movement, black freedom struggles, slavery, feminism, and the Vietnam War, among other topics. What binds these essays together, however, is their commitment to historical contextualization of the concerns surrounding these artists and their cultural products, and their attention to the tensions between progression and regression that define black political life in America. The authors reveal how 1970s artists, from Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka to Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Gayl Jones, and Fran Ross, shaped the discourses of black politics and culture and were shaped by those forces in turn. The essays gathered here speak to one another in remarkable ways, both because of the authors' commitment to the material and the editor's guidance. This volume is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities and influences of African American culture in the 1970s.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this essential work, authors Lopez Bunyasi (George Mason Univ.) and Smith (Penn State Univ.) provide an accessible guide to understanding structural racism and the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement and related organizations, both within a historical context and through contemporary lenses. With extensive scholarly documentation, the book offers a practical how-to for serving as anti-racist, everyday activists. Especially instructive is the chapter on racial terminology, organized by such categories as tools of oppression, tools of liberation, American mythology, and more. Each chapter is further equipped with "Questions and Debate" and "Additional Materials to Consider" sections. One of the book's major contributions is to present the gravity of the intersectionality of structural racism in a manner that addresses the questions, myths, paradoxes, and confusions surrounding the topic in contemporary culture and is grounded in statistical, historical, theoretical, and contemporary examples. In chapter 5 ("It Doesn't Have to Be This Way"), the authors explain the goals of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, providing concrete steps to enact those goals while exposing certain narratives that discourage people from doing so.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.