Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.
A riveting account of the human consequences of the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Journalist Neus, who field-produced the rally for Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, uses the voices of counterprotesters, local clergy, elected officials, University of Virginia students, and journalists to lay bare the collective anxieties engendered by “alt-right” protesters. The result is a gripping narrative of psychological and physical damage, laid out vividly by Neus via the voices of those on the ground. On May 13, according to the Heaphy report, White nationalists in KKK regalia “formed into ranks…in front of the statue of Robert E. Lee and chanted ‘blood and soil,’ ‘you will not replace us,’ and ‘Russia is our friend.’ ” In July, notes the UVA dean of students, “the flyers for the Unite the Right rally had started showing up and they had very neo-Nazi imagery, a fascist eagle.” According to the chaplain at a local hospital, medical professionals “were preparing for mass casualties.” On the night of Aug. 11, White supremacists marched to campus, and a UVA professor “saw 150, 200 neo-Nazis with torches….The students were in a circle, locked arms around the [Thomas Jefferson] statue.” The next night, noted a student, “a group of white supremacists, some with their hands taped like boxers, punched, kicked, and choked people who tried to block their path, leaving them bloody on the pavement.” Amid the turmoil, a counterprotestor and former member of Congress recalls, “The shocking thing…was that [the fighting] went on for like three hours and the police still hadn’t moved in.” When the police finally did arrive, they pushed the marchers into a crowd of counterprotestors. A local clergyman remembers: “What we had for hours after that were bands of Nazis roaming through downtown.” Another: “There was blood everywhere.”
Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780807011928
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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