Helpful propaganda, for those who need it. Otherwise, there’s little new here, and nothing that hasn’t been said better, and...
An unsatisfying jeremiad on the evils of the Bush administration, Pax Americana, and other avatars of the Star-Spangled Imperium.
Even those who agree with former New Yorker staff writer and Vanity Fair foreign correspondent Allman that George W. Bush has “done more than Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein to endanger America” are likely to be worn out by the time his first chapter draws to an end. Allman counters the “willful, prideful ignorance” that, he holds, surrounds the administration with a flood of ad hominem invective that, in the aggregate, makes the rhetorical excesses of Al Franken and Michael Moore seem tame: Colin Powell is reduced to near–house servant status, Condoleeza Rice characterized as “a third-rate, irredeemably conventional intellect,” Bush as a “dry drunk” who “taps into a powerful American syndrome of self-indulgent chauvinistic behavior.” Occasionally Allman hits a mark, as when he observes that vice president and so-called War Party stalwart Dick Cheney “has never carried so much as a slingshot in his nation’s defense,” a truth on the way to becoming a truism; and he does a nice job of likening the ascendancy of Dubya via judicial fiat to the similar promotion of Rutherford B. Hayes, whose actions and inactions in office deformed American politics for generations. Still, one has to wonder at the author’s journalistic seriousness when he utters sententious pronouncements such as, “The problem with Bush is not his IQ, but his emotional intelligence,” and when he presumes to instruct conservatives in what they believe. Many moderate-tending readers will agree with Allman that the present adventure in Iraq is a shameful diversion from the real war on terror and will share his indignation at recalling Dubya’s response to American inspectors’ failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction even after Saddam Hussein’s capture: “What difference does it make?” But these closely reasoned moments are few, and the rest is finger-pointing and -waving.
Helpful propaganda, for those who need it. Otherwise, there’s little new here, and nothing that hasn’t been said better, and less shrilly.Pub Date: May 3, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-562-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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