A fervent but uneven sequel about King’s vision and legacy.
A conservative African American pastor offers a critique of contemporary Black social and religious leadership.
In this second installment of a four-volume series that examines contemporary Black activists and leaders, Washington centers his attention on how the left (defined broadly as anyone from liberal centrists to Marxists) has “hijacked” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. The book begins with an argument that King’s vision centered on traditional Christian morality, nonviolence, unity, and forgiveness. While this first section mostly rehashes the series’ first volume, sometimes using the same wording as its predecessor, the bulk of the entry focuses on those who hijacked King’s dream. Too many Black leaders today, the author argues, have chosen to follow “the Jew from Chicago,” Saul Alinksy, instead of the “Jew from Nazareth,” Jesus. Borrowing heavily from a popular conservative trope, the work contends that Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is the playbook used by today’s social justice activists, who follow its advice to obfuscate Marxist goals through “deceptive” egalitarian rhetoric and to embrace amoral ethics when the ends justify the means. Another target of the ambitious volume’s ire is Washington’s fellow Black pastors, who “have sold their souls to the devil.” In this case, the devil is embodied in the “godless, all-inclusive, progressive liberal ideology of the Democratic Party,” whose support of abortion and “same-sex marriage and transgenderism” should make it anathema to Christians. Many of these preachers have also embraced Black liberation theology, which, the author argues, is “not a valid interpretation or application of scripture” and is representative of a “plantation mentality” that has left a “crippling mark” on modern-day Black churchgoers. Unsurprisingly, given the book’s take on liberals, its thin endnotes draw heavily on the works of conservative authors, from Jordan Peterson to John MacArthur, as well as research from Wikipedia. This is not a rigorous intellectual critique but rather an inadequately researched polemic that is not so much concerned with frank debate as it is with self-assured takedowns of left-wingers. That said, this passionate work’s clear arguments will appeal to an audience that shares Washington’s conservative views.
A fervent but uneven sequel about King’s vision and legacy.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4897-3607-9
Page Count: 282
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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