A timely contribution to the present election cycle.
A book whose title puts the con in conservatism, exposing far-right politics as a long-running shell game.
“Conservative philosophy demands civic virtue and moral rigor,” writes political journalist Conason, author of Big Lies and Man of the World. Yet “Americans who call themselves conservative are undeniably more susceptible to the multiplying varieties of politically tinged fakery,” including fake cancer cures, Amway soap, NFTs, gold tennis shoes, and MAGA hats made in China. However, notes the author, the con far antedates Trump and Trumpism. His story begins 70 years ago with Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn—Trump’s pre-Giuliani lawyer—who took a junket to Europe putatively to ferret out communists in the State Department but instead holed up in fancy hotels. Cohn traded in hatred and fear, as did the forerunners of today’s right-wing Christian nationalists, “scaring impressionable rubes by the thousands while relieving them of large wads of cash.” A direct path connects Billy James Hargis and Jerry Falwell to Ralph Reed and today’s megachurch supremacists, just as a solid line runs from the self-dealing vandals of the Reagan administration to Sarah Palin, who traded on commercialized fame and monetized ideology, then on to the endless supply of unabashed grifters who continue to loyally serve the MAGA-verse. Conason stops to look deeply into the Trump University swindle, which would seem to be emblematic of Trump-style business writ large. “Grifting may be too mild a term” for their collective crimes, Conason concludes, with the big lie being yet another instrument with which to separate the rubes from their money. The author is intemperate but not shrill, which won’t do a thing to separate Trumpists from their apparent devotion to being played. Still, his righteous, indignant anger makes for oddly entertaining reading.
A timely contribution to the present election cycle.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250621160
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.
The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.
Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden—is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668051351
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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
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