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
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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