A provocative book that, if correct, helps explain the ways of Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, and other demagogues.
A breathless account, with thick coats of conspiracy theory, of the doctrines that drive Steve Bannon.
Teitelbaum, whose previous book, Lions of the North (2017), focused on nationalism and anti-immigration activism in Nordic countries, is an ethnomusicologist who has long reported on the radical right. He characterizes his latest book as something between ethnography and investigative journalism. To write an ethnography, an anthropologist has to get inside what used to be called “the native’s point of view.” To his credit, the author digs deep into the foundations and guiding documents of the ideology that guides Bannon, the author and champion of such things as Donald Trump’s border wall and the Muslim ban. That ideology is what Teitelbaum characterizes as “a bizarre underground philosophical and spiritual school with an eclectic if minuscule following throughout the past hundred years”—i.e., Traditionalism, always capitalized. “When combined with anti-immigrant nationalism…it was often a sign of a rare and profound ideological radicalism.” While at Harvard, Bannon, by Teitelbaum’s account, read libraries full of esoteric religious and philosophical texts that figure into the doctrine; if there’s an Illuminati-ish feel to the investigation, it’s no accident. The author traveled far and wide to talk to the Traditionalists, who include nationalists, racists, anti-immigrants, and outright kooks as well as surprisingly thoughtful acolytes—Bannon, when not blustering, among them. It takes some reading between the lines to see how Traditionalism works in action, but one element is the widely shared thought that Europe ought to break up into little states. Thus Brexit, whose advocates might be surprised to locate its origins in the view held by a Russian nationalist (and advocate of Ukrainian genocide) that “a Europe fractured into smaller units would…disperse and weaken the power emanating from the United States.”
A provocative book that, if correct, helps explain the ways of Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, and other demagogues.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297845-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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