A well-researched, thoughtful, if wandering, sociopolitical analysis of the contemporary West.
A critique of polarization in contemporary politics.
Redman begins her narrative with the harrowing journey taken by her family in 1991 as they fled the Soviet Union to seek political asylum in the West. She would eventually become a naturalized citizen of Australia and a successful scholar in educational methodology and pedagogy. Here, she expertly blends her personal biography with a biting critique of today’s social and political divides that are fracturing even the most stable Western democracies. Though the book touches on myriad topics, the crux of its argument lies in Redman’s opposition to an apathetic “ ‘I Don’t Care’…culture that provides fertile soil for dehumanization to grow.” A post–Cold War neoliberal emphasis on cutthroat individualism and competition, especially in education, not only devalues humanism and empathy but “reinforces a preoccupation with an adversary.” This combative approach is embodied in Donald Trump and is also seen in the rising tide of nationalism and anti-immigration sentiment in Europe and Australia. While critical of this populist brand of right-wing politics, Redman is equally skeptical of its socialist alternative, drawing extensively on her experiences in the USSR. Moving beyond a right vs. left dichotomy, the book longs for a solution in the “golden middle” that points us “towards a better version of our true selves.” With a solid grasp on U.S. domestic politics as well as geopolitical relations, Redman’s narrative is insightful and informative, with ample sociological, psychological, and literary references. A chapter comparing the personality of Trump to Soviet dictators Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin is particularly compelling as the author draws parallels among the three men whose rhetorical styles lean heavy on hyperbolic self-aggrandizement and who revel in their cultlike following. The book is at times, however, meandering, with near chapter-length discursions into the history of Marxism and the Soviet Union. Though well-written, this makes for a dense read that often brings the reader a long way from the book’s original thesis.
A well-researched, thoughtful, if wandering, sociopolitical analysis of the contemporary West. (author bio)Pub Date: July 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64970-903-5
Page Count: 409
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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 philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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