Of some interest to politics watchers but less insightful than Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn (2018) in...
A sometimes-confused, sometimes-insightful journey into extreme right-wing antinomy.
A self-described anarchist who appears as a commentator on the Fox News network, Malice (Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, 2014, etc.) begins his exploration of the new—read mostly alt—right by asserting that it is a grave mistake to equate all of its adherents to Nazis, adding, “even within an ideology, whether Nazism or progressivism, one will find a continuum of thought.” Still, many of his interlocutors in this winding book are disturbingly assured that Hitler, if not Jefferson Davis, had it right. Malice, who is also Jewish, doesn’t miss a beat when told by one after another that in the ideal new right state, he would not be allowed citizenship. His reasoning is often scattershot: Since two-thirds of fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted, he writes, “does that mean that inside the breast of every expectant mother beats the heart of a Nazi eugenicist?” Eugenics is but one plank of an extreme platform that, while on a continuum, also finds points in agreement in despising democracy not because it is democratic but because it’s “a bait-and-switch used by the left to foster their own elite.” One interesting though highly debatable speculation on Malice’s part is that some members of the new right are merely acting out creatively as a “response to progressivism and the Cathedral,” somewhere between true believers and anti-establishment rebels doing whatever the mainstream disapproves of. Also of note are the author’s observations on how the Trump administration has helped various strains of the new/alt-right to enter that mainstream—even if, he adds, there are many points of divergence, since Trump is a member of the despised “Cathedral,” the power elite, himself.
Of some interest to politics watchers but less insightful than Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn (2018) in describing what makes subscribers to fringe causes tick.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15466-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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