If you weren’t already suspicious of the “war on drugs” and this collection fails to dissuade you, then you probably work...
Writers from a broad political spectrum assemble their voices to clobber the pathetic, irresponsible, and murderous war on drugs.
From magazines as diverse as The Nation and Playboy, Gray has drawn these essays lambasting the drug policy still being pursued by the government. Among the 32 pieces can be found Milton Friedman decrying the inherent racism of our drug policy, and William F. Buckley Jr. pursuing a utilitarian tact, taking into account the lives and dollars spent enforcing drug laws or, potentially, not enforcing them. Christopher Hitchens is enraged that “three decades of this grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering have led to unbelievable levels of political corruption and to an unheard-of assault on civil and political liberties.” His notion is expanded on in one of the true gems here, Graham Boyd and Jack Hitt’s citation of infringements on the Bill of Rights due to the drug war. These include the threatened arrest of doctors who even mention the use of marijuana for medical purposes, curtailments of the freedoms of religion and assembly, the practice of unreasonable search and seizure, the use of self-incrimination and cruel punishments, and the setting aside of trial by jury. Episodes of people being “assaulted in their homes by SWAT teams waving machine guns, spewing foul language, threatening to shoot people, and trashing the house” have become everyday business. Charles Bowden contributes his customary whispery, terrifying material, this time on the life of an informant, and P.J. O’Rourke manages to lift readers’ spirits with his sidelong commentary: “I don’t do drugs anymore. They interfere with the Prozac, lithium, Viagra, and painkillers.”
If you weren’t already suspicious of the “war on drugs” and this collection fails to dissuade you, then you probably work for the DEA.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-432-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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