A well-reported, engaging book. A bonus: Bill O’Reilly won’t like it, either. Politics and media junkies, on the other hand,...
Eye-opening biography of the would-be political kingmaker and Fox News mastermind.
The subject of New York contributing editor Sherman’s debut book, Roger Ailes, is said to be deeply unhappy with his portrait here—and for good reason. Ailes has said that his foes perceive him as “paranoid, right-wing [and] fat.” Leaving aside the physical, he certainly emerges here as right-wing in the neoconservative, self-interested way of the arriviste as opposed to the old-republic conservative of his small-town Midwestern ideal. By Sherman’s account, Ailes openly feared that his greatest bugaboo, Barack Obama, was going to put him in a prison camp after being re-elected. It seems certain that Ailes is an unpleasant customer, powerful enough to frighten Karl Rove into submission, quick to criticize his bevy of breast-shaking on-screen blondes for not being stunning enough (of one-time Miss America Gretchen Carlson, Sherman writes, Ailes said, “It must not have been a good year”). Sherman lingers on the unpleasant details, to be sure, but he charts the larger picture of the self-made man who is convinced that only he and a narrow number of his allies are worthy of the benefits of the free market and who has mastered the arts of TV and fabulation. Yet, even there, Ailes has not been entirely successful: For all his efforts, he never could make his first big media experiment, Richard Nixon, come off as likable, and the tea party that he helped create has apparently sent his vaunted permanent Republican majority off the rails. Yet Fox continues to hold a large market share and shape the political argument in this country, so for all his missteps (Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin et al.), Ailes promises to remain a player on the national scene, even if Sherman suggests that his dominance is coming to an end.
A well-reported, engaging book. A bonus: Bill O’Reilly won’t like it, either. Politics and media junkies, on the other hand, will have a field day.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9285-4
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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