A brave book about inspiring people, underlining the value of freedom, independence, and courage.
In an authoritarian state, writing about history is a dangerous but necessary undertaking.
Milan Kundera once wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This is the idea that informs Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with a deep and personal connection to China, who chronicles his discussions with a range of writers and filmmakers working to tell the true story of the country’s past and present. This is known as minjian lishi, which roughly translates to “grassroots history” or “counter-history.” It can be a dangerous undertaking, as successive Chinese administrations have made concerted efforts to propagate an “official” version of events, a narrative that describes the Communist Party as the pinnacle of a historical process. In particular, Xi Jinping has made the control of history a priority as a means to legitimize his authoritarian approach. Historians that do not follow the party line can face imprisonment or might simply disappear. Thankfully, there are many that accept the risks, and Johnson gives them the space to explain why and how they do it. Some have produced documentary films based on interviews with people who were persecuted over political offenses, while others have written books and articles criticizing the government over corruption or its handling of the pandemic. They have told poignant stories dealing with the repression of Tibetans and other ethnic minorities. In other cases, writers have used fiction to examine historical injustices. The internet has provided new avenues to tell stories, and dissidents have been ingenious in finding ways around the government firewalls. There is a continuing demand for their output, but several historians acknowledge the difficulty of challenging the state and see themselves more as providing a record for future generations. This represents the author’s fundamental message: Speak the truth before it is forgotten.
A brave book about inspiring people, underlining the value of freedom, independence, and courage.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780197575505
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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