Less exuberant than Tom Collins’s essential book The Trouble with Tom (2005). Still, as with all Hitchens, well worth...
O rare Tom Paine! Prolific political pundit Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007, etc.) sizes up the “self-taught corset-maker and bridge-designer” who fomented rebellion across the world two centuries ago.
Paine’s Rights of Man—the ostensible center of this entry in Atlantic’s Books That Changed the World series—was, writes Hitchens, “both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society,” as well as “an attempt to marry the ideas of the American and French Revolutions” with the aim of introducing them to Britain. Of course, America and France found manifold ways to shake off revolutionary rationality, and Paine quickly found himself a prophet without honor, even if William Pitt allowed that Paine was of course right. (Pitt added, though, that to encourage Paine’s opinions would be to invite revolution indeed.) Antimonarchical but at once radical and conservative—for instance, Paine “often wrote of economic inequalities as if they were natural or inevitable,” and he resisted the atheism of the French Revolution—Rights of Man asserted a few contradictions and foreshadowed, in some ways, the notion of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but it also pressed for a certain wide-ranging species of liberty, against which Hitchens contrasts Edmund Burke, whose own ideas of equality and liberty turned on the presence of a hereditary king. Paine’s vigorous and plain prose, Hitchens observes, has been taken as evidence of an uncouth nature, but Paine’s ideas were elevated, and of course widely influential—reverberating, in time, in the labor movement, women’s suffrage and Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech after Pearl Harbor. Paine, as Hitchens notes in this lucid and fast-moving appreciation, has no proper memorial anywhere; this slender book makes a good start.
Less exuberant than Tom Collins’s essential book The Trouble with Tom (2005). Still, as with all Hitchens, well worth reading and arguing with.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-87113-955-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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