Joining a mighty stream of political titles appearing between now and Election Day, these 43 typically trenchant essays from the high-buzz Washington journal delight in tweaking conservative noses—and liberal ones, too. The 17 issues covered here range from A (abortion) to near-Z (welfare reform). Foreign-policy mavens will find only one issue (free trade) for them; even military spending is omitted. Also missing are discussions of gay issues—especially surprising given the frequent coverage of this subject under departing editor Andrew Sullivan. Yet there is still enough here to raise hackles, spark laughs, and provoke thought. As Lind (The Next American Nation, 1995) points out in the introduction, the magazine's readers ``enjoy the parade of iconoclastic viewpoints and the occasional fractious debate among senior editors'' (of whom Lind is one). For instance, the health care section begins with Mickey Kaus's ``HMOphobia,'' includes Elizabeth McCaughey's ``No Exit,'' which rallied right-wing intellectual opposition to the Clinton health plan (and propelled its author into a successful candidacy for the lieutenant governorship of New York), and concludes with Kaus's tart ``No Exegesis,'' which charges that McCaughey ``completely distorted the debate on the biggest public policy issue of 1994.'' Sometimes the focus is on anguished responses to issues (e.g., Naomi Wolf on feminists' abortion rhetoric and Glenn Loury on urban black crime). More often, however, the tone is irreverent as the authors dissect subjects inadequately covered in the general media because of their complexity, such as Michael Kinsley's evisceration of capital gains taxes, John Judis's ``The Contract with K Street,'' which puts the lobbying industry under the microscope, and Steve Tidrick's ``The Budget Inferno,'' which uses Dante's version of Hell as a metaphor for the way in which the federal government subsidizes corporations, industries, and individuals. Amid the usual gaffe-and-gotcha campaign journalism (which TNR itself has sometimes been guilty of), a bracing reminder of the enduring issues.
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-05086-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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