A fair and balanced portrait of one of America’s most controversial organizations.
A gun-owning investigative journalist’s history of the National Rifle Association.
Smyth admits he’s a “Fudd,” a derisive NRA term for a gun owner who supports gun regulations. As befits that nuanced stance, the author offers a measured, scrupulously researched political history that shows how the NRA has evolved from an organization promoting rifle marksmanship to an unrelenting foe of all limits on guns. Smyth blends a great-man approach to history with an instinct for following money trails, telling the story of the NRA largely through its leaders and how their financial or other decisions shaped the group and the nation. First came founders George Wood Wingate and William Conant Church, former Union officers who, dismayed by “the appalling lack of marksmanship on both sides in the Civil War,” started the group during Reconstruction. The 20th century brought presidents like Harlon B. Carter, a convicted murderer whose conviction was overturned on appeal; and Marion Hammer, the first female president, who, after the 1992 Rodney King riots, wrote an article called “You loot—we shoot” for NRA publication American Rifleman. The current leader, Wayne LaPierre, has recruited celebrities like Charlton Heston and turned the group into a deep-pocketed political titan that gave $54.4 million to candidates in the 2016 elections. After the Columbine massacre in 1999, the NRA developed “a playbook” for responding to demands for gun controls, which included tactics such as: “Deflect by saying this is not a time to discuss politics but a time to mourn.” Many such unsavory details will be maddening to gun rights absolutists, but Smyth avoids quoting anonymous sources, drawing on well-documented material and staying neutral (and above accusations of bias) on controversies. The result is an authoritative, no-frills story, long on solid information but short on the color and passion that might have made it sing.
A fair and balanced portrait of one of America’s most controversial organizations. (first printing of 200,000) (Adult, nonfiction, history, political history, organizations, National Rifle Association)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21028-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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