A sharp survey of the political landscape guaranteed to seed nightmares among the sensible, educated, and progressive.
QAnon cousins? Here’s your field guide to their eldritch politics.
“Populist politicians win when enough voters feel like they’re losing,” writes Goldwag, author of The New Hate. Like David Bennett’s Party of Fear, this book traces a right-wing political movement that exploits widespread fears of deep-seated conspiracies and absurd theories of ethnic “replacement.” Such things were once whispered; now they’re shouted, as when Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s governorship against Josh Shapiro, the victor in 2022, pilloried the “privileged, exclusive, elite” Jewish day school Shapiro had attended as a child. Not to be outdone, House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik tweeted the alarmist charge that Biden’s White House “& the usual pedo grifters” were keeping baby formula off the market by sending “pallets of formula to the southern border” to distribute it free to undeserving immigrants. All hokum, of course, but Stefanik and Mastriano worked the Trumpian “I love the poorly educated” trope, race and education being the two things that most sharply divide American voting blocs. Thus, Goldwag writes, uneducated white Americans floated Trump into office, many of them having swallowed whole the “paranoid style of conspiracism” in which a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor was the locus of child sex trafficking and that Jews “promote miscegenation and vice” in order to weaken Christian America. The result is a spasmodic era of hatred and violence based on “narratives [that] simultaneously frighten and reassure, because they present a world without moral ambiguity.” Unlike other recent students of conspiracy theory, Goldwag sees little hope that the narrative can be pointed in the direction of truth: Trump may go away, but Trumpism will endure, and “we might not recognize his successor until it is too late.”
A sharp survey of the political landscape guaranteed to seed nightmares among the sensible, educated, and progressive.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780593467060
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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