A noted cultural historian prophesies the demise of the American Left in the current battles over political correctness. Gitlin (Culture and Communications/New York Univ.; The Sixties, 1987, etc.) looks at some of the current polemic surrounding issues like affirmative action, immigration, and multiculturalism. His real subject, however, is fundamentalist notions of what is true and good, whether held by William Kunstler or Rush Limbaugh, a moral view of politics for which America is regarded with puzzlement by the rest of the world. Serving as a recurring theme is a strange controversy around a set of history textbooks being considered for adoption by the Oakland school board, a controversy that brought out seemingly every special interest group in northern California. At a public meeting, Gitlin writes, one speaker angrily protested that a book in the series did not mention Martin Luther King Jr. or Jackie Robinson, although the volume's coverage ended in 1900; another that the Japanese internment camps received short shrift; still others that Chinese- American, Armenian, Portuguese, Italian, and other ethnic histories did not rank at the forefront. Gitlin acknowledges some merit in these arguments but offers the view that ``like it or not, the decisions that shaped America's political, legal, and economic institutions were largely made by Europeans and their descendants.'' Gitlin observes that such ultimately trivial controversies keep liberal thinkers and activists from their larger work: ``While the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department.'' He opines that the loss of a multicultural but distinctly American patriotism, now splintered by ethnic and class divisiveness, will certainly doom progressivism: ``If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left.'' Provocative and convincing reading that will doubtless earn Gitlin demerits from the PC orthodox. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-4090-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
IN THE NEWS
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
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
