Thoughtful considerations on the intersection of history, bigotry, folklore, and politics.
Dispatches from the harrowing resurgence of global antisemitism.
One theme that emerges in this well-curated collection of essays is that while antisemitism has become more visible in recent years, it has never ebbed. As Glanville writes, “the perception of Jews as a globally united group, operating clandestinely across borders, has survived as a formula to be applied in any era.” Photographer and writer Mikołaj Grynberg describes how Poland’s Jewish population has eroded due to pogroms, Communist-era edicts, and gag orders. It is illegal there to assert that Poland played a role in the Holocaust despite it being the site of the most infamous Nazi death camps. Writer and translator Natasha Lehrer discusses how France’s culture of “universalism” provides cover for antisemitic rhetoric. Novelist Olga Grjasnowa shows the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Germany, often fobbed off on Muslim immigrants but common among native Germans as well. All of this has a long history, as Glanville discusses in an essay on “blood libel” and persistent false accusations of Jews committing murder for religious rituals. As many of the contributors note, antisemites are newly emboldened by a global wave of populism spearheaded by Donald Trump, infecting not just QAnon conspiracy theorists, but legislators in the U.S., England, and other nations. That line of demonization has a long history, as well: Activist Jill Jacobs points out that in the 1940s people spread rumors of murderous Communist Jews massing at the Mexican border. Israeli journalist Tom Segev thoughtfully explores how this shift has changed politics within and around Israel, intensifying debates over distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The subject merits a longer, more comprehensive study, but the variety of perspectives in this slim collection captures the emotional intensity of the subject and the urgent need to address it. The other contributors are Philip Spencer and Daniel Trilling.
Thoughtful considerations on the intersection of history, bigotry, folklore, and politics.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-02065-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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