A vigorous call for Americans to defeat “the stubborn virus of trumpism in its bloodstream.”
Anger- and outrage-filled dispatches from a Russian-born writer.
Raised under a dictatorship, Iossel (English and Creative Writing/Concordia Univ.; Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life, 1991, etc.), winner of Guggenheim, NEA, and Stegner fellowships, immigrated to the U.S. in 1986 and became a citizen in 1996. His unique perspective as an immigrant from the Soviet Union distinguishes his blistering critiques, collected from Facebook posts, of Donald Trump from many other recent anti-Trump books. The author follows American politics from Election Day 2016 through October 2018, witnessing events such as Charlottesville, the Las Vegas and Parkland shootings, Al Franken’s resignation, Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, and Robert Mueller’s investigation. Repeatedly, Iossel characterizes Trump as a liar, racist, bigot, con artist, “ignorant buffoon,” “an empty-headed, ridiculously narcissistic, sociopathic man-child” unable “to love anyone or anything,” and dangerously impulsive. “Welcome to the dark times, the age of dishonesty and mendacity, unbridled avarice and ignorance, bigotry and traitorousness—and, above all, the age of the dumb in America,” Iossel wrote on Inauguration Day. Incredulous at the outcome of the election, he was despondent that America was “unable to resist the virus of fascism” that infected other Western countries; he is certain that Putin and other Russian oligarchs, aiming to undermine American democracy, achieved the “pleasant surprise” of Trump’s win. The author has no doubt that Trump is in thrall to Putin, “a former low-level KGB functionary, and professional liar and snitch, catcher of damaged human souls…an ignorant, none-too-sophisticated, remarkably vengeful and cruel, amoral and corrupt” man. Like Trump, he is greedy, ambitious, and “firmly in the grip of raging megalomania.” Yet Iossel knows that a minority of voters supported Trump. “Trumpland,” he concedes, “is not the ‘real’ America. It is the worst of America”: racist, xenophobic, ignorant, small-minded, and cynical. If the nation holds onto its decency, the author believes, it will survive Trump.
A vigorous call for Americans to defeat “the stubborn virus of trumpism in its bloodstream.”Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9995416-0-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New Europe Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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