A concise, nuanced investigation of contesting definitions of the American dream.
A professor examines the thematic use of the American dream in speeches, books, and film.
When it was first released in 1946, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life was labeled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI as “Communist propaganda” due to its depiction of the greedy, coldhearted slumlord and banker Henry Potter. In the 1980s, the memorably wholesome film was described by one critic as the “perfect film for the Reagan era.” This paradoxical interpretation of It’s a Wonderful Life, argues author Shaviro, represents competing definitions of the American dream, in particular the historic conflict between market meritocracy versus egalitarianism. Analyzing the rhetoric of high-profile U.S. politicians and ideologues, works of literature, and films, Shaviro explores these rival meanings of the American dream. Egalitarianism, he notes, focuses not just on equal opportunities, but on “ex post economic outcomes,” while the meritocratic view assumes that “winners and losers are not equal after all” and that, ultimately, the more deserving rich “owe the poor nothing.” A professor of taxation at NYU Law School whose previous publications have centered on literature and inequality, Shaviro has a firm command over both U.S. economic policy and pop culture, and his analysis of the contested American dream explores a diverse raft of books, from The Great Gatsby (1925) to Atlas Shrugged (1957), and films, from The Searchers (1956) to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The book also includes a sophisticated analysis of the ways in which “White solidarity has frequently proved powerful enough to outweigh economic and class concerns,” as evidenced in American books and films as well as in the speeches of politicians like Donald Trump. It concludes with a convincing, if pessimistic, assessment of 21st-century racism, economic inequality, and conservative backlash. Backed by an impressive bibliography, this is a well-researched book that carefully balances a scholarly writing style with engaging anecdotes from popular movies and books. Its efforts at making academic writing more accessible are bolstered by its brevity.
A concise, nuanced investigation of contesting definitions of the American dream.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781839983825
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Anthem Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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