Meaty food for thought, steeped in righteous bile.
A ticked-off field guide to modern America, a place where the con artists of high finance call the shots.
“There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else,” writes Rolling Stone correspondent and frequent TV commentator Taibbi (The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, 2008, etc.). Given that almost everybody in that “everybody else” category knows nothing about how finance works, it’s all too easy for the grifters to convince us that Wall Street is our friend and Washington our enemy. The author writes with populist fervor, but with the left-trending populism of an Upton Sinclair rather than a Father Coughlin. He has no use for the teabagger crowd or its prom queen, Sarah Palin—who, he writes, with memorable venom, “looks like a chief flight attendant on a Piedmont flight from Winston-Salem to Cleveland, with only the bag of almonds and the polyester kerchief missing from the picture.” For all that, he does not discount the wrath that Palin and her cohorts express; even though it’s misplaced, he writes, it’s very real. Whether his patient explanations will ever reach that crowd remains to be seen, but Taibbi writes carefully about such things as the way that “gamblers disguised as Wall Street brokers” manipulate commodities to the exclusive benefit of the small capitalist—grifter, that is—class. The author writes with scorn for recent political maneuverings that amount to giveaways great and small to the con artists, not least of them the health-care reform package so despised by right-wingers—who, Taibbi adds, have ever since “disgraced themselves by spinning out one easily debunked lie after another” and otherwise behaving like infants.
Meaty food for thought, steeped in righteous bile.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52995-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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