A tired argument for Tea Partiers and fans of conservative talk radio.
Curmudgeonly screed that simply echoes rhetoric all too familiar in today's political dialogue.
Even those who wholeheartedly agree with radio talk-show host Sykes (50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-good Education, 2007, etc.) are unlikely to find much food for thought in this warmed-over attack on what he describes as America's “new culture of bailouts and irresponsible grasping, everything from corporations feeding at the trough to the permanent 'victims' of Hurricane Katrina.” While the author directs some of his ire toward CEOs and large corporations, his main target are the largely undeserving lower classes and a welfare state that has replaced the older American culture of self-reliance and increasingly “sustain[s] deadbeats” with “Other People's Money.” Sykes accepts the necessity of the “[n]early half of means-tested welfare payments that go to low-income elderly in nursing homes or the disabled,” but not so the other half, which he claims go to “able-bodied adults and their children.” He targets extended unemployment benefits, foreclosure relief and even school breakfast programs for needy children as unwarranted: “If America's children were actually in the throes of famine or the landscape were littered with victims of deprivation, even an expensive program might be justified.” Many readers on both sides of the partisan political divide, will likely agree with his diatribe against “The Great Bailout of 2008-2009…[in which] taxpayers were essentially required to underwrite a decade of [financial] recklessness,” but it's not exactly news.
A tired argument for Tea Partiers and fans of conservative talk radio.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-54770-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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