A hilarious and pertinent parody to help pass the time until the November election decides the nation’s fate.
Lithgow continues his poetic skewering of “a POTUS whose pants are routinely on fire.”
In this clever follow-up to Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse (2019), the actor and author unleashes more razor-sharp satirical wit, lampooning the second half of “our distractible,” Twitter-obsessed chief’s presidential term. Lithgow begins with the impeachment in late 2019 and moves through the litany of lies and blunders that have formed the Trump administration’s teetering foundation. Beyond the primary target, the author also draws farcical caricatures of fumbling politicos like senior advisers and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani (“filled with rage and babbling bluster, / ‘America’s Mayor’ has lost his luster”). Lithgow renders Mitch McConnell as a manipulative, suffocatingly partisan reptile: “By keeping his party in line and tight-knitted, / The Tortoise prevailed and got Dumpty acquitted / But by treating the trial as a legal blood sport, / He rendered the Senate a kangaroo court.” Political strategist and a man Lithgow calls the “dirty trickster, artful dodger,” Roger Stone gets a full-page poem and makes good company with another Trump blunder: “substituting his Sharpie for science” after mistracking Hurricane Dorian. The cover art and interior line drawings provide suitable graphic accompaniment to the text. As with the first volume, this one is a short, succinct, laugh-out-loud affair, and no one in the Trump administration is above Lithgow’s eagle-eyed scrutiny. Unwilling to leave even readers with limited political knowledge behind, the author also includes brief profiles of the politicians that he eviscerates. All the snarky novelty doesn’t reveal anything new nor untrue; rather, Lithgow whisks the obvious into a creatively brilliant distraction that most readers will enjoy. Even loyal Trumpers may find a stray chuckle for the ridiculousness and the current administration’s political circus.
A hilarious and pertinent parody to help pass the time until the November election decides the nation’s fate.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-79720-946-3
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Chronicle Prism
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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