A poorly argued polemic that relies on shopworn right-wing talking points and eschews reasonable debate.
A pastor presents a conservative vision for American spiritual and political revival.
This final installment of a four-volume series on how left-wing activists allegedly “hijacked” the Rev. Martin Luther King’s vision of racial equality centers on author Washington’s plan for American “recovery” from the “leftist radicalism” that he says has “taken root” throughout the government. The only way to avoid a dystopian near future, he asserts, is through “a genuine nationwide spiritual revival.” As pastor of the Abundant Life Community Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Washington draws on an ample array of Bible verses and stories that emphasize God’s blessings on nations that follow his commands. This book’s conservative interpretation of Scripture espouses a worldview that sees abortion, gay relationships, same-sex marriage, and legalized pornography and gambling as sins for which Americans must “repent and ask for forgiveness from God.” On numerous occasions, the book also suggests that former President Donald Trump “was indeed the man…who God could use to bring about a nationwide revival” before he was stonewalled by “deep state bureaucrats.” Just as many people on the political right have labeled moderate Republicans as “RINOs,” or “Republicans in name only,” Washington similarly lambasts “BINOs,” or “believer[s] in name only”; the author, who’s Black, particularly applies this label to Black people who profess to be Christian while voting for Democratic politicians. Readers who already share Washington’s conservative perspective may find the work’s relentless anti-liberal barbs appealing. However, there’s much to critique in this book’s narrow reading of Scripture, its demonization of non-Christians who follow “false” religions, its attacks on the millions of Christians who hold centrist or progressive values, and its overall penchant for hyperbolic rhetoric against supposed Marxists in American schools and government. Moreover, the book’s efforts to characterize King as a right-wing Christian nationalist—the same pastor who formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention following a public rift with the conservative National Baptist Convention—lacks engagement with King’s well-documented advocacy for a liberal “social gospel.”
A poorly argued polemic that relies on shopworn right-wing talking points and eschews reasonable debate.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4897-3613-0
Page Count: 310
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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