Imagine P.J. O’Rourke describing the effects of chewing tobacco rather than doing drugs.
Can an NPR talk-show host from lefty-liberal Seattle convert himself to conservatism by confining his news sources to the Washington Times and Fox News, his music to country and his interviews to habitués of rodeos and shooting ranges?
Probably not, but that’s the conceit behind Moe’s memoir of nine months spent trying to understand conservative America. The premise works well enough, though some readers may draw the line at the author performing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” during “Country Karaoke Night” in a blue-collar bar. Much of the book consists of interviews with conservatives of various sorts, from the editors of the Weekly Standard and National Review to Michael Medved and the mayor of Rexburg, Idaho. The mayor’s pious good sense and devotion to effective government help crystallize Moe’s understanding that there is a distinction between conservatism and the Republican Party. Indeed, the only “conservatives” to whom he warms not at all are the pudgy participants at a conference of college Republicans, all of them political fixers in embryo. (The author likes some Republicans better than others: He contrasts the fatuity of the Reagan Museum with the sober substance of the Nixon Library and Birthplace.) The book does not produce insights so much as pop-culture commentary on its march to the conclusion that conservatives are people, too. Aside from a denunciation of Toby Keith for commercially exploiting patriotic country music in a time of war, the commentary is good-natured and amusing. Sometimes the humor is unintentional, as when the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of indie and alternative music is employed to explain country music, without further clarification for non-residents of Planet Seattle. Funniest of all are the interspersed film reviews, which assign a numerical score for the effectiveness of a movie’s conservative message.
Imagine P.J. O’Rourke describing the effects of chewing tobacco rather than doing drugs.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085401-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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