From Booklist
An established voice on racism and feminism, Jordan offers a collection of essays that criticizes our reluctance as a nation and as individuals to examine our own moral stances even as we discuss the immorality of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. She declares that Americans are not hated because the nation is free and just, but because it fails to respect the self-determination of others. The collection includes a letter to a friend of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and several essays on a wide array of subjects, including reversals of affirmative action, breast cancer, rape, O. J. Simpson, racial and sexual identity, and bisexuality. All of the pieces are aimed at provoking readers to adapt a larger, more global perspective. Vanessa Bush
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Some of Us Did Not Die SYNOPSIS
June Jordan (1936-2002) was a professor of African American studies at U.C. Berkeley, and author of 11 books of poetry, five children's books, a novel, three plays, a memoir, and five volumes of political essays. This collection of 40 essays spans Jordan's career, from the 1960s civil rights movement to the aftermath of September 11, in which she reflects on such topics as supremacist values and policies, racial and gender inequality, children and education, life and hope. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
An inspiring poet, activist, Progressive columnist and UC Berkeley professor of African-American studies, Jordan died last month from breast cancer at the age of 65. Her Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint provided the ideological impetus behind myriad community-oriented poetry events and poems since its publication in the mid-1990s (a shorter essay version appears here). This book brings together 32 essays from four previous collections and eight previously uncollected recent pieces. Repeated engagements with sex and sexism, and race and racism, are matched with advocacy for legal reform ("Break the Law!") and agitation for collective responses to oppression and parsings of its language, including a seminal essay on Black English ("Nobody Mean More to Me than You"). Jordan also documents trips to Mississippi, Nicaragua and the Bahamas, and offers a still relevant assessment of the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982. New pieces include the title work, a response to September 11: "I hope we will bestir ourselves to rally around an emergency/ militant reconstruction of a secular democracy consecrated to the equality of each and every living one of us." With a steadfastness and resolute power, these essays show us a way toward that consecration. (Sept. 5) Forecast: Jordan's Soldier, an autobiography published in 2000, is in print in paperback from Basic. Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997 (Doubleday) and the 1989 release Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (Thunder's Mouth) are also available, along with Poetry for the People (Routledge). National tributes to Jordan from major writers should be appearing as this goes to press; they could be enlarged and displayed with Jordan's work. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
June Jordan (1936-2002) was a professor of African American studies at U.C. Berkeley, and author of 11 books of poetry, five children's books, a novel, three plays, a memoir, and five volumes of political essays. This collection of 40 essays spans Jordan's career, from the 1960s civil rights movement to the aftermath of September 11, in which she reflects on such topics as supremacist values and policies, racial and gender inequality, children and education, life and hope. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Kirkus Reviews
A grab-bag of essays and verse on politics, literature, and travel. Jordan (African-American Studies/UC Berkeley; Technical Difficulties, 1992, etc.) harbors understandable rage at the stupidities and inequities of life in a fundamentally racist society in a time when things, by all rights, should have gotten better. Instead, she writes, African-Americans "have moved from The Invisible Man to The Invisible People" whose opinions and indeed whose reality scarcely come into account in matters such as elections and education. Some of the stronger pieces here, many previously published in her column in The Progressive, address the vast complex of injustice that is contemporary American life. Others, better still, address educational and cultural issues such as Black English and the overall decline in standards in schools everywhere and for all: "We have silenced or eliminated minority children. We have pacified white children into barely competent imitations of their fear-ridden parents." Still others are less pointed, including several pieces on what amount to literary enthusiasms; coupled with Jordanﾽs hortatory approach to politics, these give the collection the feel of a bookish pep rally at which the exclamation mark gets quite a workout: Letﾽs all read Walt Whitman! Letﾽs take it to the man! Down with ex-husbands! Many of the op-ed pieces, too, are ephemeral, so much so that readers in the not too distant future may need footnotes to find their way through them. Who, they may wonder, was O.J. Simpson, other than someone Jordan criticizes for not wanting to be seen as black, but instead as a raceless star? What was a Sandinista? And what on earth does "Sometimes I am the terrorist I mustdisarm" mean? Judicious editing would have helped. Still, of some interest to activists, and especially to educational reformers.
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