Interesting and enjoyable reading for the election year, with a bonus story among many other presidential narratives: the...
George Washington threw a dollar coin across the Delaware, George Dubya, the onetime “Texas Prince Hal yearning to become Henry V,” throws missiles at Iraq. Who can tell how the spin will play?
Writes Cornog, associate dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, once-upon-a-time stories sell candidates and make legacies, and any president worth his salt has taken great pains to see to it that his story—the “crafted presidential narrative” of the subtitle—is shaped and then told to maximum advantage. Nixon got it right (thanks in large part to then-speechwriter and now apostate conservative Kevin Phillips) when he ran with the notion that he was representing the “silent majority,” the nonprotesting, law-abiding taxpayers of Anytown USA; through Nixon’s dogged sticking to that very story, writes Cornog, “the term ‘silent majority’ successfully established itself in public discourse, doing its master’s bidding faithfully.” Nixon got it wrong before that selfsame court of public opinion when, on his way out the Oval Office door post-Watergate, he snuffled that no one would write a book about his sainted mother, an episode that more Americans are inclined to remember about the fallen president. It’s all wheel-of-fortune stuff: as Cornog provocatively notes, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq may have in some regard been an effort to rewrite the ending of his father’s administration, which isn’t remembered for much of anything save squandering victory in the first Gulf War, and that wheel is still in spin; we could end up with two bad stories, not one. And though Americans, Cornog asserts, like fairy tales, like to hear that their president enjoys “the happy family that we all wish were true of our own,” they don’t much enjoy excessive moralizing—which is why the nation never really loved Jimmy Carter but was inclined to forgive Bill Clinton his indiscretions and Ronald Reagan his dopiness.
Interesting and enjoyable reading for the election year, with a bonus story among many other presidential narratives: the origins of the Baby Ruth candy bar.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-022-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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