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CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

BUSH/CHENEY’S NEW WORLD ORDER

It adds up to a nicely juicy rant—but not much more—some of the details of which may come as news to some readers.

“I will use our military as a last resort, and our first resort.” Thus spake Dubya—and Miller saw red.

Miller (Media Studies/NYU; The Bush Dyslexicon, not reviewed) detests Bush, and for many reasons. One is the sitting president’s refusal to speak and think clearly: “We should take especial notice,” Miller writes, “that the president cannot speak standard English when he tries to talk about American democracy.” Another is that selfsame president’s imperial hauteur: to a reporter questioning the possibility of war in Iraq, Bush snapped, “I’m the person who gets to decide, not you,” while to another—this time Bob Woodward of the Washington Post—he said, “I do not need to explain why I say things. . . . I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” Then, of course, there’s the war in Iraq, explained by a man whom Miller characterizes as an architect of modern neoconservative military strategy thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” With reasons thus enumerated and plentiful, Miller proceeds to say many unkind things about Dubya, some of them funny, some incisive, some not. Speaking of Bush and his veep as a Borg-like unity—Bush/Cheney—he scores points by writing of the “imperial lavishness” of the administration’s spending, which even conservatives have been complaining about. He scores more points by revealing that Bush/Cheney and minions Wolfowitz, Rumself, Perle, et al., had harbored designs on Iraq since at least 1998. And he offers a minor tour de force by contrasting Bill Clinton’s supposedly scandalous on-the-tarmac haircut at LAX with a better documented incident in which a Bush White House party of September 5, 2001, ended with the discharge of several hundred fireworks late at night and unannounced to the neighbors.

It adds up to a nicely juicy rant—but not much more—some of the details of which may come as news to some readers.

Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2004

ISBN: 0-393-05917-0

Page Count: 388

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

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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