A tremendously timely and important study of the rhetoric of hatred in our times.
A deeply relevant study of genocidal motivation and manifestation in America.
Rutgers anthropologist Hinton offers deep instruction for anyone seeking to better understand the bigotry that permeates American society. As the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights and an expert witness in the prosecution of Khmer Rouge ideologue Nuon Chea, who was convicted of genocide in the international tribunal in Cambodia in 2018, the author is well situated to investigate the topic. Structuring the narrative around his college seminars, he uses as a point of departure the 1935 bestseller by Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, which focused on a populist demagogue who advanced bigoted, dictatorial themes, just as Trump did decades later. Hinton is deeply concerned with the idea of why people hate and how that hate plays out publicly. The violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 plays a large role in this work, as the author shows how previously hidden White supremacist ideologies came to the fore. Hinton shows how these “ruptures” are simply one element of a long-standing systemic problem that Trump flushed into the open. “His presidency,” writes the author, “was a symptom of a long and enduring history of systemic white power in the United States, one filled with moments in which genocide and mass violence took place.” In addition to contextual background, Hinton moves methodically through specific White supremacist texts. As a committed teacher in the Socratic method, the author continually teases out answers from his intelligent, engaged students, who recognize that “it” has already happened here, many times over—from Native genocide to slavery to Jim Crow to the recent proliferation of White supremacy. As the author closes his well-researched, readable account in July 2020, one only wishes he could have included a section on the violent acts of Jan 6, 2021.
A tremendously timely and important study of the rhetoric of hatred in our times.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4798-0801-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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