Next book

DEMOCRACY NOW!

TWENTY YEARS COVERING THE MOVEMENTS CHANGING AMERICA

An impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent.

A 20-year chronicle of a radio, TV, and Internet broadcast program whose mission has been to expose, defy, and edify.

In 1996, award-winning journalist Amy Goodman (co-author: The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupation, Resistance, and Hope, 2012, etc.) began hosting Democracy Now!, a radio news hour on public broadcasting focused on the presidential race among Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot. The show was slated to last nine months, ending with the election. Two decades later, it has emerged as an important source of news and analysis, broadcast on more than 1,400 public TV and radio stations around the world and on the Web. Goodman—with her co-authors, Mother Jones contributing writer David Goodman (co-author: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, 2008, etc.) and Democracy Now! contributor Moynihan—celebrates the program’s “remarkable journey” with this angry, hard-hitting volume. From Clinton to the current presidential campaign, no politician escapes the authors’ critique. They skewer the George W. Bush administration for lies that led America into a useless war and propelled us into the “endless war” that has followed. They condemn Barack Obama’s reliance on drones, pointing to casualties among children and families. “Militant groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda,” the authors write, “couldn’t have a more effective recruiting tool than the indiscriminate bombing and drone strikes by the United States.” The authors also discuss military interventions; whistleblowers (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning merit praise) and the government’s attempt to quash them; immigration policy; capital punishment; income inequality; responses to climate change; the “routine” indignities inflicted on gay men and lesbians and the brave LGBTQ resisters; police brutality and the nation’s ineffectual and racist prison system; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the scandal of psychologists’ sanctioning of torture. “Independent media is the oxygen of democracy,” the authors assert.

An impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent.

Pub Date: April 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-2358-0

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

Next book

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

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

Close Quickview