The gold standard among conservative columnists remains William F. Buckley Jr., who can be enjoyed as literature even if you...
Columns published over the past five years provide conservative pundit Will’s trademark curmudgeonly commentary on the gilded Clinton years and the dawn of the more troubled W. era.
King of the Beltway pundits in the 1980s, Will (The Woven Figure, 1997, etc.) was ever so gently dethroned in the ’90s. On the right, there were the more red-blooded types, and on the left there was Bill Clinton, unlikely to ever invite George to an Oval Office confab. Will, however, has always been better as a contrarian than an insider. He takes on such distasteful (to him) features of the high ’90s as the use of the courts to enforce entitlements, the tastelessness of the first Bubba in the White House (including, of course, the sexual peccadilloes that lead to his impeachment), the unctuousness of the first lady, and the expansion of a bureaucratically powered government into ever-new areas of private life. This time, Will’s best essays are on cultural rather than political topics, with particular attention paid to what he sees as the threat to the “seamlessness” of cultural memory embodied in dumbed-down pop culture and “leftist” academic culture. Will’s faults are evident in here too: for instance, his tic of larding columns with enough quotations to make Bartlett want to sue. He also has a penchant for intemperate, off-the-cuff anathemas. His conclusion about Clinton, for instance: “the worst person ever to have been president.” Really? Worse than, say, slaveholder and would-be ethnic cleanser of Indians Andrew Jackson?
The gold standard among conservative columnists remains William F. Buckley Jr., who can be enjoyed as literature even if you don’t agree with him; the same cannot be said of Will. Nonetheless, a must-read for aficionados of Beltway journalism.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-83821-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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