Village Voice Washington correspondent Ridgeway (Who Owns the Earth? 1980, etc.) opens this excellent history of America's racist far right with a chart entitled "Web of Racism": a lucid historical mapping-out of the labyrinthine entanglements among racist groups, from the KKK to the American Nazi Party to the Posse Comitatus, and evidence not only of Ridgeway's formidable understanding of the far right, but also of the wealth of illuminating illustrations that bolster the book. In accompanying direct, compact prose, Ridgeway traces the filaments of the web back to the 1787 writings of French cleric AbbÇ Barruel, who invented the idea of a global cabal orchestrating world events. In 1806, Ridgeway explains, a retired Italian army officer determined that the conspirators were Jews: the birth of the myth of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy that, according to the author, is at the heart of all rightwing racism. Ridgeway expertly follows the seeping of the myth—which grew to encompass other anti-minority elements as well—into American politics through the KKK and the anti-Semitic rantings of Henry Ford; through J. Edgar Hoover and the Minutemen of the 60's, and the white-power groups—the Aryan Nations, the Order—of the 70's and 80's—and up to today's right-wing resurgence, limelighted by the "kinder, gentler racism" of David Duke, and shadowed by growing hordes of violent proto-Nazi skinheads. And this resurgence, Ridgeway persuasively argues, is just a whisper of the shout to come, with racism overtaking anti-communism as the dominant political issue of our time. Clear and comprehensive—and what makes this an exceptional complement to James B. Coates's Armed and Dangerous (1987) and Kevin Flynn & Gary Gerhardt's The Silent Brotherhood (1989) is the incredible array of supporting illustrations and documents, including photographs, cartoons, insignia, posters, text extracts, and maps (e.g., of David Duke's new America, which would, among other things, relegate all Asian-Americans to "East Mongolia"—the Hawaiian Islands).
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 978-1560251002
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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
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
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