A passionate but uneven exploration of King’s legacy.
A conservative African American pastor makes a case against progressive policies and ideas in this political book.
In this third installment of a four-volume series that targets contemporary Black leaders and social justice advocates, Washington continues his crusade against the left (which, per the work’s broad definition, includes everyone from President Joe Biden to activist Saul Alinsky). This entry begins with a lengthy introductory summary of the previous two books, often borrowing from their narratives word for word, in which the author argues that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblically based, pro-American vision has been usurped by left-wing scholars, Black Lives Matter activists, and a Democratic Party that is both historically and currently rooted in racism. After rehashing previous arguments against progressives, this book centers many of its critiques on the Black community because of its supposed support for abortion, “high rate of Black single-parent families,” and “Black-on-Black crime.” As pastor of the Abundant Life Community Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Washington opposes abortion (which he refers to as “Black genocide”). His stand is rooted in a conservative reading of biblical passages, which are quoted at length throughout his lucid and thought-provoking narrative. But the book lacks compelling evidence to support its claim that King, the inaugural recipient of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, would oppose reproductive rights. Other chapters are less rooted in religious doctrine than they are in familiar, contemporary conservative tropes against “liberal elites,” Marxist educators who “brainwash” students with “racist critical race theory,” and other left-wing groups. Significant attention is also devoted to “the loss of America’s right to bear arms,” an ironic position given the author’s frequent evocation of King. Not only was an embrace of nonviolence central to King’s ideology, but he also frequently denounced activists, from Robert F. Williams to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who employed pro–Second Amendment rhetoric that centered on their right to an armed self-defense against White supremacists. Unfortunately, the volume’s research is deficient, drawing heavily on Wikipedia and the works of right-wing firebrands like Glen Beck and Dennis Prager. The account’s scant research fuels its shallow depictions of liberal and moderate views. Still, the fervent book will appeal to readers who share Washington’s conservative perspective.
A passionate but uneven exploration of King’s legacy.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4897-3610-9
Page Count: 310
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
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
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