Readers in Texas—and even nationally—who want change should pay attention and get started on the author’s to-do lists. She...
How to change the political landscape in Texas, “the reddest of the red-hot states, covered by a big bubble that protects the most reactionary, radical, and rabid set of officeholders that much of the country has ever seen.”
As Ann Richards’ campaign manager in 1990 and 1994, Rogers (Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics, 1990) watched as the Democrats ignored warning signs and the Republicans took over the state. The Democratic Party was locked in internecine warfare, spewing out grievances dating back to Reconstruction, and Republicans rejected the 1950s-era anti-communist hysteria and John Birch Society as bad for business and moved to the middle. The author explains the strange world of Texas: its complexity, diversity, special interests, and political history. Only with a sense of Texas’ sincere hatred of any and all government since the Civil War can one understand how to secure the vote. The author’s disappointments, morphing into real bitterness, show throughout the book; she calls Texas the “reddest wacko state in the union.” The takeover of the state by Republicans was complete by 1998, when they won every statewide elected office and just about obliterated the Democratic Party. Texas is her story, but the practices and politics used have spread to the rest of the country. The imprint of Texas Republicans can be seen in the leadership of the tea party, gerrymandering of congressional seats, mega donors, tort reform, and elsewhere. When she calms down, Rogers provides genuinely sharp insight into where the Democrats went wrong. She explains how they must copy the successful methods of the Republicans, microtargeting Hispanics, blacks, and cynical whites. She notes that the price of oil plays a large part in party power switching, especially the governor’s office, which she considers of primary importance.
Readers in Texas—and even nationally—who want change should pay attention and get started on the author’s to-do lists. She knows the territory, and she wants it back.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07908-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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