A fascinating way to look at the fracturing of a nation presumed to be united; it’s one that offers little hope for less...
Big data comes to the service of big generalizations about American tribes, and it speaks volumes about how we divide along many fronts, not least of them political.
As University of North Carolina–based political scientists Hetherington and Weiler (co-authors: Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, 2009) write, if you’re a conservative, you’ll tend to buy an American-made truck and have a dog, whereas if you lean left, you’ll have a cat and a hybrid or foreign-made passenger vehicle. The causal relationships are a little fuzzy, but a look at the amygdala shows that conservatives tend to be more certain that danger lurks just around the corner and more attuned to survival—thus the big growling vehicle and the big growling dog. Liberals, conversely, tend to think that people are inherently good and that the world is mostly a safe place. By the authors’ account, most people are neither wholly conservative nor wholly liberal in their worldviews, though their positions tend to harden when confronted with someone who doesn’t agree with them; there are reasons for that as well, some of them related to media diet, the subject of an engaging side discussion. The resulting “politicization of everything” plays out everywhere: If you’re a lefty, you’ll head to Starbucks, if a righty, to Dunkin’ Donuts; if you’re a Hillary Clinton voter, you’ll watch tennis instead of football, if you watch sports at all. That said, there are limits: “For their part, the Redds don’t watch football with the same relish anymore. They’re sick and tired of the fact that everything is a political issue now and don’t believe the anthem, in particular, should be one.”
A fascinating way to look at the fracturing of a nation presumed to be united; it’s one that offers little hope for less polarization anytime soon.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-86678-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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