A convincing and alarming—and perhaps alarmist—cry that treason is afoot.
Did Donald Trump meet with the Russians before the election? By this account, almost certainly—and “virtually all of Trump’s senior staff and family had numerous contacts with Russia that were nothing short of suspicious.”
It’s a remarkable bit of spinning that has allowed right-leaning media to portray Russia, the longtime rival and even enemy of the United States, as our friend. By intelligence officer and counterterrorism analyst Nance’s (Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe, 2016, etc.) account, the victor in Trump’s electoral win was Vladimir Putin, who “won with the aid of Americans who had turned on their own values.” In this, everyone is implicated, from the putatively liberal media and its obsession with Clinton’s emails to pro-Trump voters who cast their ballots for him despite their candidate’s “slavish devotion to Putin.” It’s a story that isn’t going away, despite what the president might wish. Certainly, Nance writes, the intelligence community is keeping its eye on the prize, and for those in the administration who urge that it’s all just misperception and accident, Nance counters, “coincidence takes a lot of planning.” The author argues that much of that planning originated inside the Kremlin, but much also came from the desk of Steve Bannon, a key actor in forging a vanguard for a new kind of pro-Moscow conservative movement in America. In a narrative dense with “active measures” and “Kompromat,” Nance traces the revival of Russian enmity to Putin’s second term as president, when he turned his KGB training to good use in weakening his American opponents by exploiting their divisions—exactly what those active measures are supposed to do. The author wraps up his case with a provocative declaration that will occasion divisions all on its own: “Trump has definitely convinced me that he transitioned from an unwitting asset of Vladimir Putin to a willing asset working in league with the Russian Federation.”
A convincing and alarming—and perhaps alarmist—cry that treason is afoot.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-48481-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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