There’s not much hard news in Brock’s account of “the last battle of the Clinton Wars,” but it’s a useful casebook on how...
That “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton warned about all those years ago? It’s real. And then some.
So writes Brock (The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, 2004, etc.), who was notoriously part of it, the author of the “bit nutty and a bit slutty” slur campaign against Anita Hill. Since then, as he recounted in his 2002 memoir Blinded by the Right, he had a road-to-Damascus (or D.C.) moment and founded the Democratic PAC American Bridge, which has a favorite daughter in Clinton. In his role as activist and media critic and watchdog—he also founded Media Matters—Brock here charts the evolution of a well-funded (courtesy of the Koch brothers and their ilk) right-wing information/misinformation/disinformation machine that saw its first real coup in the swift boating of John Kerry. He argues that the Dems did it all wrong by refusing to dignify that whisper-and-shout campaign with a response; just so, without naming too many names, he wishes that they’d smack some of the Benghazi/Hillary hater crowd down with a few well-pointed barbs: “Hillary’s email practices didn’t break any rules—but Jeb Bush’s did.” Granted that Brock’s is a thoroughly partisan approach, a student of the modern media could do worse than read along with him and wonder whether the New York Times really doesn’t have it in for Clinton, who, as first lady, senator, secretary of state, and now presidential candidate, can’t seem to catch a break with the Gray Lady. Blame some of it on Howell Raines and some on Bill Safire—though it has to be said that the Clintons have a habit of drawing negative attention in any event, a matter that Brock shrugs off. Closing with suitable fire and brimstone, the author hints that he’s got something really juicy in the wings to shake up the race, so stay tuned.
There’s not much hard news in Brock’s account of “the last battle of the Clinton Wars,” but it’s a useful casebook on how big-money politics and political operators work.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3376-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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