Red meat, well past its sell-by date, for the anti-Pelosi crowd.
By-the-numbers recitation of the Arkansas senator’s conservatives-good, liberals-bad reductions.
Though he writes briefly about his experiences in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s little specificity about what he did there. The author criticizes Joe Biden for completing a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that completed a deal set in place by his predecessor. Naturally, there’s no criticism of Trump to be found here. The man is evidently a superhero, and “the Trump administration treated our friends like friends and our foes like foes.” Meanwhile, whatever liberals do is bad, dating back decades. Consider the Vietnam anti-war movement, about which Cotton blusters, “Vietnam was the perfect opportunity for the New Left to act on its hatred of America. These cowards refused to fight, of course, but they did more than that. They condemned their brave fellow Americans who would fight, sided with the enemy, and unleashed violence across our country. Many pampered radicals avoided the war by dodging the draft.” That last part may be true, but so did the aforementioned Trump, to say nothing of Rush Limbaugh and (though he protests otherwise) Ted Nugent and a legion of other Cotton allies. There’s not much you haven’t already heard from the late Limbaugh in Cotton’s pages: Liberals want to see Communist China take over the world (unless it was John Kennedy, who was happy to cave in to the Russians instead); liberals lost the otherwise winnable war in Vietnam (“Democrats sacrificed victory, satisfied with merely looking tough in the short run”); leftist radicals wanted to bomb the Capitol during Vietnam, a matter that Cotton repeats numerous times while keeping mum about the actual radical attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; liberals are smug members of the elite class (though Cotton is a graduate of Harvard Law). It’s like listening to a tipsy uncle rant at the Thanksgiving table.
Red meat, well past its sell-by date, for the anti-Pelosi crowd.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2679-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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