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TWILIGHT OF THE ELITES

AMERICA AFTER MERITOCRACY

A provocative discussion of the deeper causes of our current discontent, written with verve and meriting wide interest.

In this forcefully written debut, Nation editor at large and MSNBC host Hayes examines some of the consequences of accumulating institutional failures.

Whether discussing the dysfunctions of government, Fortune 500 companies, Catholic bishops or Major League Baseball, the author traces common features to a “broad and devastating crisis of authority” resulting from a breakdown in trust. Hayes examines the relationship between trust and authority and shows that what we actually know usually depends on others, ultimately on a source of institutional authority such as a political party. “We don’t acknowledge that our most fundamental, shared beliefs about how society should operate are deeply elitist,” writes the author. “We have accepted that there will be some class of people that will make the decisions for us, and if we just manage to find the right ones, then all will go smoothly.” Hayes uses the term elite differently than the manner employed by Fox News or Sarah Palin. He defines it as a “small, powerful and connected” group with “three main sources of power: money, platform, and networks.” Of course, money can confer power and buy the other forms of influence, so what was once trusted may no longer be considered either competent or as acting in good faith. Many policymakers put forth education as the answer. Hayes insists that it is no longer enough, arguing that equality of opportunity must be complemented with equality of outcomes, through tax reforms and other measures.

A provocative discussion of the deeper causes of our current discontent, written with verve and meriting wide interest.

Pub Date: June 12, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-72045-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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