Some readers will welcome the breezy flippancy adopted from the Internet, but the thoughtful should look elsewhere for...
Cillizza, writer of The Fix, a political blog sponsored by the Washington Post, makes use of all the tricks of his trade in this debut about what he calls “the greatest sport,” American politics.
The author assembles a playbook that helps identify the players and strategies and proposes improvements. Like many others, Cillizza sees the economy as the major issue in upcoming elections, and he considers the effect of Hispanic population growth on the GOP and discusses the Supreme Court's contribution to campaign finance reform. The author compares the passions of Ron Paul's conservative supporters to his own attachment to his all-time favorite TV show, Friday Night Lights, and he offers his thoughts on books and movies about politics. From the blogging world, Cillizza provides websites he finds useful. In addition to his assessment of the current political climate, the author presents proposals for reform of the political arena—e.g., doubling the length of terms for House members, using nonpartisan panels for redistricting—each intended to improve the process. In a discussion of candidates who never had a chance of winning on the biggest stage, like Chris Dodd, Rick Santorum and Alexander Haig, Cillizza grants that it is possible for someone to have a reason for running for office even while knowing they will not prevail. Dodd did it, he writes because “he had always wanted to run for president and would have spent his life regretting it if he hadn’t given it a try,” and Santorum was concerned about his legacy. The author does not discuss the importance of contributing to the shaping of national debate as a reason for participating.
Some readers will welcome the breezy flippancy adopted from the Internet, but the thoughtful should look elsewhere for serious discussion.Pub Date: July 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-98709-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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