Though it lacks the gravity and grace of Lynn Pan’s Sons of the Yellow Emperor (1994), which covers much of the same ground,...
California-based historian Chang (The Rape of Nanking, 1997, etc.) searches out common themes in the Chinese immigrant experience over time.
“America is a place with gold floors, diamond windows, tall buildings, and seven-foot-tall whites with red moustaches,” recalls a Chinese immigrant who came to the US in 1979, sounding very much like his compatriots who arrived in America 13 decades before. They too undertook the dangerous business of relocating to a new land only to discover that racist policies were often the rule and neighbors tended to suspect that the newcomers’ loyalties lay elsewhere. Also unchanging over 150 years, however, were the harsh realities at home that prompted the Chinese to what they called “Gold Mountain” in the first place. The Chinese did not arrive in a single wave, writes Chang; although more than 100,000 of them flocked to work in the goldfields during the California rush of 1849, in general they have come (and gone) at a fairly constant rate throughout the last two centuries, with the occasional surge caused by events such as the Communist takeover of Hong Kong in 1997. As with most other immigrant groups, the children and grandchildren of the newcomers readily enter the cultural mainstream. Unlike many immigrant groups, however, the Chinese have long been singled out, stereotyped, and too often attacked. Drawing on interviews and a wealth of documentary material, Chang brings the immigrant experience into the present, writing effectively of the “three pressures” now facing American-born Chinese: “the pressure to excel, the pressure to become white, and the pressure to embrace their ethnic heritage,” all the while contending with a dominant society many of whose members mistrust and fear them.
Though it lacks the gravity and grace of Lynn Pan’s Sons of the Yellow Emperor (1994), which covers much of the same ground, this is a solid addition in a far-from-exhausted field.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03123-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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