A pointed, dense exposé á la George Orwell.
A veteran British journalist tracks the disintegration of public discourse along the trajectory of his long career covering politics in England and the United States.
The proliferation of Donald Trump’s crassness of speech, ad hominem attacks, and outright lies is hardly surprising, since they stem from the introduction of the vernacular and the technological into public rhetoric. While there was never any “golden age” of public language, writes longtime journalist, producer, and current New York Times Company president and CEO Thompson, there have been in recent decades “specific accelerants that make our circumstance exceptional. These include the revolution in media and communications that the author witnessed firsthand from his first job as a research assistant trainee at BBC Television just as Margaret Thatcher swept into power as prime minister in 1979. Using classical rhetorical terms as touchstones, Thompson notes that Thatcher’s radicalism extended into her language as well; it was “hard-edged, insistent, utterly sure of itself.” Eventually, she could not convince the voters of her essential ethos and became the rather unfeeling “thing her enemies said she was.” By the time of Ronald Reagan’s election, Thompson asserts, the traditional vocabulary of “grandiloquence,” used so famously by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, had given way to distilled, ideological one-liners that were perfect for TV news but carried little serious policy content. Hiring cutting-edge, cynical marketing teams to spin their messages, these conservative leaders honed “the stylized hyperbole of reality TV, the knowing comic beats of the late-night talk shows.” Thompson examines how Tony Blair and his tabloid political editor Alastair Campbell adopted a fierce “combination of professionalism and paranoia” and, along with Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin, a kind of stringent, populist, adversarial tone the author calls masochistic. The author also thankfully takes on those leaders who promote war and unscience—the outright denial of scientific experts on climate change—as egregious examples of eroding the public trust in language.
A pointed, dense exposé á la George Orwell.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05957-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
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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