An impassioned takedown of a “militant minority.”
An in-depth look at the chief strands that make up the American far right.
“The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” So writes journalist Stewart, whose previous work has concerned the disappearing wall between church and state. Just so, among the major contributors to MAGA and other far-right elements have been the leaders and foot soldiers of “a radically new, intensely politicized religion centered on a newly concocted ‘pro-life’ theory and—among a large number—the idea of spiritual warfare.’” Stewart argues that the movement is an elaborate con whereby power elites pretend to share common ground with “the Infantry,” while what she terms the Funders and the Thinkers seek self-centered gains that do nothing for ordinary people: “Each gains power by deceiving the others. Inevitably, they attempt to deceive the rest of us, too, and then they begin to deceive themselves.” Antidemocratic, opposed to public education, and given to conspiratorial thinking, this united front, albeit with divergent goals, has gained so strong a foothold in national and now international politics by drowning out the opposition and keeping the “right-wing outrage machine” fully engaged, Stewart says. But she reminds readers that “the antidemocratic reactionaries are nothing more than a disproportionately mobilized minority,” vastly outnumbered by centrists. She counsels that the far right is essentially divided, though it appears to be monolithic, and that its message is often contradictory and often off-message entirely. Defeating it, she notes, will require long-term thinking, since the far right is “not merely planning to win the next election.”
An impassioned takedown of a “militant minority.”Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781635578546
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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