by Anna Merlan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
A lucid, well-researched look at a slippery topic.
Engrossing assessment of the profitable mainstreaming of conspiracymongering in civic and political life.
In her debut book, Merlan, a reporter at Gizmodo Media Group’s Special Projects Desk, captures this unsettling narrative succinctly and concretely. As she writes, once “the United States narrowly elected a conspiracy enthusiast as its president,” there followed the codification of a long-gestating seamy underbelly of shared belief in ominous, far-fetched plots. The election of Donald Trump allowed a network of conspiracy profiteers, ranging from InfoWars’ Alex Jones to white supremacist Richard Spencer, to accrue wealth and credibility; their acolytes “loved Trump, even the left-leaning among them who might have once preferred Bernie Sanders.” Yet, she notes, “conspiracy theorizing has been part of the American system of governance and culture and thought since its beginnings.” These dual lenses of current events and longitudinal narrative allow for clear structure. In each chapter, Merlan focuses on a conspiracy subtopic—e.g. UFO theories, false-flag proponents, anti-vaxxers, the sovereign citizen movement—chronicling her conversations with prominent adherents and the academics, activists, or investigators who document and fitfully counter them. She is cleareyed about the harm done by figures like Jones and his ilk, who have inspired harassment of Sandy Hook victims and the family of DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose family discovered that “social sites give enterprising self-investigators access to the subjects of their conspiracies as never before.” Similarly, while attending a “white nationalist cookout” shortly before the 2017 Charlottesville events, the author concluded that the much-discussed “alt-right” relies on familiar, shopworn conspiracy theories regarding immigrants and Jews: “Hate groups all over the world are fueled by terrified, wild conjectures about the people they hate.” However, Merlan has sympathy for conspiracy theorists influenced by actual abuses of power, noting that “the history of UFOs is a perfect illustration of the way in which genuine government secrecy feeds citizen paranoia.” The author ably navigates this troubling landscape, with thought and some humor, though she seems more engaged by recent figures and controversies.
A lucid, well-researched look at a slippery topic.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15905-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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