books | Drums in the Global Village

A Revolutionary For Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story.
Leo Zeilig.
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 340 pp., $22.95.

Quite a revelation about the power and pitfalls of complete faith in a revolutionary Tanzania and Guyana. The un-mentioned truth of this just-the-facts bio is that the Black world still produces people exactly like this in terms of energy and focus, but the difference is that they are completely and happily colonized. Reading this book from the 2022 prism was like absorbing very detailed speculative fiction. Rodney is the grassroots servant-hero personified, the Bizzaro version of what Harvard Law School will continue to turn out, thanks to its success with Barack and Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Those who know and love the top stories of the last 30 years or so of Batman comics–particularly those of the last 15 years–will think this is two-thirds of a masterpiece and forgive the exposition-ish info dump at the beginning of the third act. The film’s last part attempts to serve the needs of both epilogue and the now-customary post-credit let’s-set-up-the-next-two-films. This outing is so powerful it will make you forget any Batman film not named The Dark Knight. After this soon-to-be trilogy, the only future film direction I’d see is Batman Beyond because it would be the only part of this soon-to-be 90-year-old character that will not be mined by then.