by Dana Milbank ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022
A well-researched, dispiriting dissection of politics that lends a genealogy to homegrown authoritarianism.
Washington Post columnist Milbank locates the origins of the Jan. 6 insurrection in a GOP pivot 25 years earlier.
“Before the antigovernment MAGA…rallies, there were the rage-filled Tea Party town halls of 2010 and the Republican Revolutionaries of 1994, advised by [Newt] Gingrich to call Democrats ‘traitors,’ ‘sick,’ and ‘corrupt.’ ” As the author reminds us, at the time, Gingrich was briefly the speaker of the House of Representatives. Among Milbank’s rogues’ gallery are other figures familiar to us today, including Roe v. Wade opponent Brett Kavanaugh, who cut his teeth with a lingeringly obscene line of questioning of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and “worked closely with cranks” to try to prove the Clintons’ role in Vince Foster’s notorious suicide. By Milbank’s account, the GOP’s assault on science, education, and democracy itself began with Gingrich’s cynical “contract with America,” only a couple of whose planks were ever made law—the most lasting a paperwork reduction act. Perhaps ugliest of all was Gingrich’s dog-whistling insistence on racist politics that pitted blue-collar and rural Whites against their imagined enemies, namely people of color. Gingrich and company were not above slandering their own, as with the assault on John McCain’s character in a campaign largely engineered by Karl Rove, who believed that “squandering national unity and politicizing war would win Bush seats.” That war, in Iraq, was driven by a habit of lying that Donald Trump would raise to an art form. Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, and others amplified the lies. Meanwhile, even though former Speaker of the House John Boehner glumly observes, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump Party,” the losing actors of yore are back, with Gingrich now serving as an adviser to Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy. “The man who started American politics down the road to destruction,” writes Milbank, “is returning to see his work completed.”
A well-researched, dispiriting dissection of politics that lends a genealogy to homegrown authoritarianism.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54813-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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