If “Let’s go, Brandon” is your idea of elevated political discourse, then this is your book.
A conservative commentator lays into the current president with a familiar litany of complaints.
Strassel, author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, juxtaposes Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, linking the two on the undeniably problematic issues of inflation and energy as well as foreign policy. According to the author, it was all Carter’s fault that the mullahs held the embassy staff in Tehran for so long (never mind the Reagan team’s back-channel deal to delay their release until after the election), just as “Biden’s reckless withdrawal from Afghanistan embarrassed our allies, abandoned Afghanis, and made the U.S. look weak” (never mind that Trump’s team negotiated that retreat). Furthermore, Biden exaggerated in the midterms when he “crisscrossed the country recalling the January 6 riot and insisting ‘democracy’ was on the ballot.” Strassel excoriates the supposedly radical-left administration now in the White House, contrasting Biden with the more centrist Carter crowd and drubbing both by comparison with her apparent hero, Ronald Reagan, who “didn’t lead with cultural issues.” It’s a relief when Strassel eventually finishes wailing away on liberals and gets to work on her own team, allowing that the midterm election didn’t quite work out the way the GOP wanted because voters preferred Democrats to “disfavored Republicans [who] had something in common: strong ties to Trump.” The author spends much of the latter part of the book conjuring up notions of a big-tent Republicanism that eschews Proud Boys–like militancy, at least in public, and instead urges that “if politicians want to see a change in the culture, they could start by acting like grown-ups.” Perhaps, for starters, by not insisting that “many of Biden’s people…were picked because they checked an identity-politics box.”
If “Let’s go, Brandon” is your idea of elevated political discourse, then this is your book.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781538756218
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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
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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