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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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