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
Those who missed them in Playboy, The New Republic, and other media can catch up with culture diva Paglia's latest performances here. The special effects are as spectacular as ever; the act, however, is getting old. As in her previous collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture (not reviewed), Paglia fills this volume with every magazine piece of hers from the last few years, transcripts of her TV appearances, an annotated bibliography of media references to her, and even a section of cartoons in which she was featured. Paglia's production is like a three-ring circus. There's competent journalistic cultural criticism on one side, encompassing appreciations of figures like Sandra Bernhard and Amy Fisher, and reviews of books by Madonna and Edward Said. Paglia's well-publicized polemic against feminist and gay movement dogma, which continues here, hasn't gained any subtlety. Her loose use of the opprobrium ``Stalinist'' will strike those misguided readers who take her essays on ``culture war'' topics seriously as genuinely offensive. In another ring, there's batty scholarship. A long essay written especially for this volume offers a ``pagan theory of sexuality'' for the contemporary world. Those seeking rigor will be warned off by the fact that Paglia's title for this piece is taken from dialogue in the movie Ben Hur. The really compelling action comes in the center ring, where the carnival of Paglia's construction of her own persona never stops. Her straightforwardly autobiographical writing is brilliant. One moving memoir celebrates the formative influence on her of four gifted and rebellious gay male friends; another hilariously revisits the promise and the pomposity of the Susan Sontag whom the young Camille Paglia idolized. Inspired by Sontag, Paglia exclaims that ``we need more women stars who can run their own studios!'' Paglia herself has become a star, and as such she inevitably fascinates. But she often seems miscast as an intellectual leader, mirroring as she does another aspect of her image of Sontag: ``no argument, only collage.''
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-75120-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Humorist and chronicler Frazier (Coyote v. Acme, 1996, etc.) returns to Indian country for an astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Reintroducing a figure from Great Plains (1989)—Le War Lance, with whom the author has been friends for 20 years—Frazier explores his own affinity for the Sioux by relating the curious twists and turns of their friendship. A raconteur of the first rank as well as an alcoholic, Le has roamed from Hollywood to upper Manhattan, but is finally back home on the rez. Since Frazier’s own wanderlust has brought him and his family to Missoula, Montana, he often goes to visit Le. Over time, Le introduces his brother and sisters, uncle and aunt, even the graves of his parents and other brothers, endlessly spinning wild yarns that Frazier reproduces without judgment. Elements of tragedy (the girlfriend of Le’s brother is killed by a drunk driver) mingle with near-misses (a hose breaks at the distributor, enveloping the family in a cloud of propane gas), but all this is the normal state of affairs at Pine Ridge. As Frazier ponders the history of Indian bars locally and nationwide, or considers the treaty violation that allowed the US government to steal the Black Hills from the Sioux, he also finds resilience in the great-granddaughter of medicine man Black Elk, and hope in the remarkable story of SuAnne Big Crow, a teenage basketball hero who reunited her bitterly divided people by her example, and whose spirit still lives even after her death in a car crash in 1992. Frazier’s remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study of one people in one place at a particular moment in time reveals as much about its author as its subject, and as much about “us” as “them.” (Photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22638-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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