A fascinating catalogue of impeachable offenses and prosecutable crimes. Is Miller right? Stay tuned.
Media-studies maven and dedicated Bush detractor Miller (Cruel and Unusual, 2004) argues that moving on and getting over it are exactly the wrong things to do.
Setting forth a circumstantial argument that would probably not stand up in court but that serves fine for the purposes of speechifying and politicizing, Miller deems the Bush/Cheney victory in the last presidential election “startling. It was, in fact, miraculous, even if the US press chose not to point that out.” And why miraculous? Well, for one thing, the exit polls in contested states such as Ohio and Florida gave Kerry/Edwards a slight edge; for another, a Gallup poll conducted just before the election showed that the incumbent’s approval rating was at a dangerous low, and in all events, “Kerry’s numbers were considerably higher in the swing states.” So what happened? Well, Miller asserts, a theocratic, fundamentalist movement working in concert with sinister forces within the administration, and over a long and steady campaign: Its various agents saw to it that felons were disenfranchised (for criminals, presumably, vote blue), scared away minorities from the polls, capriciously closed voting places on Election Day, set up fewer voting machines in poor districts than in wealthy ones, kept the press from conducting exit polls, designed ballots so that Bush/Cheney were the first choice, rigged machines so that the GOP candidates somehow received many more votes than there were registered voters, tallied the vote in secret, made it difficult for Democrats to vote absentee and told many big lies. Miller’s case relies strongly on anecdotal evidence, though a reader inclined to accept the very possibility might well imagine that an independent counsel of the Ken Starr variety could easily turn up firmer proof; suffice it to say that Miller’s argument is pitched to true believers against the vast right-wing conspiracy.
A fascinating catalogue of impeachable offenses and prosecutable crimes. Is Miller right? Stay tuned.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-04579-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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
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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