A memoir of a life devoted to defending civil rights and a scathing critique of that movement’s unfortunate decline.
Trebach (Fatal Distraction, 2006, etc.) has previously written about the criminal justice system’s abuse of minorities. He was a committed activist in the 1950s and ’60sand an official at the Civil Rights Commission, and he’s been a lifelong Democratic liberal and supporter of Barack Obama. However, he argues that the civil rights movement, and liberalism in general, has betrayed the original spirit of its cause and corroded race relations in America with craven political opportunism, incendiary race-baiting and a climate of censorship. “The race card is why our racial atmosphere is so poisonous, when we should be enjoying color-blind relations everywhere,” he writes. “That evil card is played so frequently these days that many of us sometimes don’t realize just how often it is used.” Trebach looks at the Trayvon Martin shooting case; he says that some people willfully appropriated the tragedy for the sake of declaiming racial prejudice, and he skillfully presents little-covered but pertinent details of that incident. He also considers what he feels are the abandoned promises of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to usher the United States into a proudly post-racial era. The most unsettling target of Trebach’s analysis, though, is African-American crime, which continues to balloon at an alarming pace. He argues that intolerance of open discussion and the reflex to denounce as racist any attempt to fully investigate such crime’s causes have impeded good-faith attempts to alleviate the problem. In general, the author contends, programs that are designed by self-appointed representatives of African-Americans tend to deliver more harm than good. Written in plain prose that brims with disillusionment, this book makes an impassioned call for a politics truly free of racial discrimination, in keeping with the tenets of one of the author’s heroes, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Overall, Trebach brings a wealth of academic expertise and personal experience to these thoughtful reflections.
A timely, courageous contribution to the debate regarding racial justice in America.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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