A thoughtful distillation of research that is sadly relevant to our current political moment.
The factions and personalities behind the so-called alt-right, associated both with a white nationalist resurgence and Donald Trump.
BBC senior broadcast journalist Wendling has experience in investigating political extremism, which familiarized him with the unpleasant online “trolling” culture that seemed central to alt-right politics. He finds the alt-right fascinating due to its amorphous nature, terming it “an incredibly loose set of ideologies held together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call ‘globalism,’ and establishment politics of both the left and the right.” The author distinguishes between “the so-called ‘alt-light’ and a harder core,” lumping cynical provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos in the former group and the latter, “people who are devoted to the idea of ethno-nationalism.” For both factions, “the heady days between Trump’s victory and his inauguration were the high-water mark for the popularity and cohesiveness of the alt-right.” Wendling narrates the improbable journey of Trump and his acolytes in chapters focused on a particular subgrouping of the alt-right—e.g. “Ordinary Guys,” “Conspiracy Theorists,” “The Violent Fringe.” He first looks at the far-right intellectuals who, disheartened by Barack Obama’s election, termed themselves “paleoconservatives” opposed to multiculturalism and immigration, inspiring white supremacist Richard Spencer to develop “a raw online communications strategy.” A consensus developed among users of the anything-goes message board 4chan and angry mens’ rights activists, pickup artists, and video game fans, evident in the Gamergate movement, which targeted women in gaming for abuse. Meanwhile, media figures like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones normalized conspiracy theories while attacking progressives. All these ugly threads came together in the 2016 election via “a technical and philosophical alliance between the alt-right and pro-Putin activists online.” Wendling writes clearly, bolstering his argument with the words and activities of fringe figures, yet in concluding the alt-right movement has evoked its own obsolescence, he underestimates the violent potential of white supremacy’s mainstreaming.
A thoughtful distillation of research that is sadly relevant to our current political moment.Pub Date: April 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7453-3745-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pluto Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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