Often repetitive, but with a point: the culture war is a real war, and the fundamentalists have their eyes on the prize.
A full-bore attack on Christian nationalism’s crusade to remake America.
A reader of her book, warns peripatetic journalist Lavin, is “an enemy combatant in a war of the spirit that began before your birth and is being waged every day by determined, ordinary people you wouldn’t look twice at if they passed you in the street.” Those people, Lavin asserts, are a small minority; evangelicals represent just 14% of the populace. Still, that’s nearly 50 million people, and they have an unshakable goal for which they’re willing to play a long game: namely, to establish “a Kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect.” That kingdom would make possible scenarios worthy of The Handmaid’s Tale: women, in the Christian fundamentalist order, are definitively second-class beings, meant to bear children and do the dishes. Children are meant to be obedient, and if they’re not, they’re subject to severe corporal punishment. On that point Lavin lingers too long, repeating assertions that “obedience to God requires doing violence to children” and its variants for page after page. Nonetheless, her analysis of where home schooling figures into the equation is disturbing: some children reject the indoctrination, but most, she holds, “live to be the future of the faith militant.” The unremittingly alarmist tone makes Lavin’s book a chore to read at times. Still, her overall points are well worth noting, particularly when it comes to looking at the long game: the evangelicals, allied now with supremacists and nationalists, have been concentrating quite effectively on transforming key aspects of American governance, especially the judiciary, into which the Trump administration has rushed to appoint lifetime judges committed to preserving “religious liberty,” which according to Lavin means “anything they did or said came under the stamp of morality, because it was they who were saying it.”
Often repetitive, but with a point: the culture war is a real war, and the fundamentalists have their eyes on the prize.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780306829192
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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