Of much use in understanding the course of late-19th-century American history, a time of turmoil that resembles our own in...
A closely argued account of how various constituencies—women, farmers, African Americans, workers—vied for a place at the table in the reunited republic.
As Bancroft Prize–winning historian Postel (San Francisco State Univ.; The Populist Vision, 2007) recounts, the Civil War brought newfound demands for equality in unexpected ways. At the beginning of the narrative, the author chronicles how logisticians responsible for burying the Union dead at Gettysburg struggled to devise a way to represent each contributing state equally, “a challenge given that more bodies came from some states than from others and given the sloping and uneven terrain of the grounds.” Other interest groups would find the terrain even rougher. The Grange movement, for instance, sought to represent the interests of small farmers in a time of federal consolidation and the growth of great railroad and manufacturing corporations. The press of the agrarians for a Cabinet-level secretary of agriculture led to some uncomfortable accommodations, including making common cause with Southern farmers opposed to Reconstruction. As a result, African Americans were often excluded, though sometimes not, in influential visions of the postwar nation. The Grangers and radical labor movement alike saw their enemy as the “monopolists,” a category that “included bankers, lawyers, grain elevator and cotton gin operators, insurance agents, grain and cotton purchasers, farm machinery dealers, and local merchants.” The women’s temperance movement took similar views: The enemy was not just alcohol, but also inequality, which yielded a movement to outlaw booze and, as well, grant women the right to vote, to say nothing of demanding equal pay for equal work. Postel has a keen eye for unlikely juxtapositions. For instance, as he writes, the leader of the hard-charging Knights of Labor became not just a close ally and protector of the radical activist Mother Jones, but also, and simultaneously, “an official in the federal bureaucracy enforcing the Chinese exclusion laws and other restrictive policies.”
Of much use in understanding the course of late-19th-century American history, a time of turmoil that resembles our own in many respects.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8090-7963-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and “a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private.”
Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to “control and tame the narrative,” further explaining that she has “so long and so passionately resisted the victim role” because she does not view herself as “purely a victim” and not “purely powerless.” However, she adds, that does not mean she “was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there.” Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: “To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free.”
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2801-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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