Broad in its scope yet concise, this is an important nonconformist interpretation of American history.
The vocal historian and foreign policy expert revisits the past to offer suggestions for current and future U.S. policymakers.
With a reputation for knowledgeable, incisive, and provocative readings of history, Bacevich delivers his latest addition to a growing body of thought-provoking work. A well-known critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and what he sees as American imperialism, the author, who served in the Army for more than 20 years, continues along those lines of argument while also addressing the added complexities caused by climate change, racial and economic injustice, and the global pandemic. Bacevich works in a historiographical mode. “Apocalypse didn’t come out of nowhere,” he writes. “It had antecedents, evident in the very way we have packaged the past—what we have chosen to remember and what to discard, what to enshrine and what to ignore.” He continues, “a defective approach to policy survives because those charged with thinking about America’s role in the world cling to a series of illusions that derive from a conveniently selective historical memory.” Building on the theoretical approaches of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the French historian Marc Bloch, among other thinkers, Bacevich consistently chips away at the myth of American exceptionalism, “unearthing the substructure of existing U.S. policy, the seldom-examined assumptions and taken-for-granted practices that have sustained the national security apparatus.” Moving beyond that myth requires the rejection of the idea of a unified Western monolith of culture or the concept of a “special relationship” in relation to political allies. It also means facing head-on the often grim realities associated with the ways in which a pandemic, climate change, and entrenched racism wreak havoc on American military, culture, and policy. Bacevich covers all of these issues with an admirable amount of context for such a relatively short work.
Broad in its scope yet concise, this is an important nonconformist interpretation of American history.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-79599-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
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