A review by logantea
Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
3.0
In this book Kareem Abdul Jabbar flexes his extensive knowledge, thoughtfulness, and personal experience on matters of race, religion, gender, income inequality, and other issues. There's a lot I like about this book. His thoughts are well reasoned and articulated and backed up by facts and statistics. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is that he doesn't merely rant about problems, he diagnoses them and provides thoughtful solutions to them. This solutions wouldn't fix all of America's ills, but they'd make great progress.
However, as great as the thoughts he expresses in this book are I found the experience of actually reading it exhausting. There are many sections of the book that read like a paper written for a college course -- exhausting levels of restatements, statistics, anecdotes, and metaphors to make sure a point is hammered home (and perhaps pad page count in the case of a college paper). I feel like 30% of this book could have been left on the cutting room floor and it would have been just as effective.
He also relies overwhelmingly on metaphors, similes, and pop culture references to make his points. This makes his writing very approachable and it all feels genuine (not pandering to those in on the reference) but I grew very tired of it about 30-40% of the way in.
There's a lot of great stuff in here, but it's probably worth more of a skim than a close read (that's certainly what I found myself doing towards the end).
However, as great as the thoughts he expresses in this book are I found the experience of actually reading it exhausting. There are many sections of the book that read like a paper written for a college course -- exhausting levels of restatements, statistics, anecdotes, and metaphors to make sure a point is hammered home (and perhaps pad page count in the case of a college paper). I feel like 30% of this book could have been left on the cutting room floor and it would have been just as effective.
He also relies overwhelmingly on metaphors, similes, and pop culture references to make his points. This makes his writing very approachable and it all feels genuine (not pandering to those in on the reference) but I grew very tired of it about 30-40% of the way in.
There's a lot of great stuff in here, but it's probably worth more of a skim than a close read (that's certainly what I found myself doing towards the end).