Grammy-winning musician Davis gets taken for a ride by the KKK in this futile and pointless volume. When a friend of his says he is joining the Ku Klux Klan, Davis approaches a few local heavies hoping to find ``common ground'' on which they can stand. Surprisingly, Davis is able to form friendships with some of the racists he meets—or so it would seem. What never occurs to Davis is that he may be being used by these people. For instance, Roger Kelly, who is still active in the KKK, is depicted as a white ``separatist'' as opposed to a white ``supremacist.'' Davis seems oblivious to Kelly's smooth way of talking out of both sides of his mouth and casts him as a victim in an episode of ``reverse discrimination'' at Howard University, where Kelly is denied entrance to a talk show on racist groups. In the most ridiculous case, Kelly names Davis godfather to his newborn daughter. Nowhere during these scenes does the author consider that his book might be the perfect vehicle by which Kelly can gain new members. In another truly offensive scene, Davis visits the National Holocaust Museum, where he interviews several luminaries on the hate scene who are protesting the museum but neglects to mention their purpose—the protesters deny the Holocaust took place. Indeed, the anti-Semitism of the KKK is a massive blind spot for Davis. Finally, he endlessly makes excuses for Klan members who are no longer violent, as if this somehow mitigates their continued membership in such a terrorist organization. The dual dangers of this book are that some readers will find tacit support for their beliefs that blacks are easily led and others will view the Klan as ``not all that bad'' and perhaps join where they otherwise might not have. (16 pages photos not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-88282-159-8
Page Count: 335
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
These transcripts of discussions by two French intellectuals— a man and a woman—about relations between the sexes make for generally delightful reading. The male interlocutor is LÇvy (Barbarism with a Human Face, 1979, etc.), best known as one of the advocates of the ``nouvelle philosophie'' who in the late 1970s led an insurrection against Marxist and structuralist theory. The woman is Giroud (Alma Mahler, or the Art of Being Loved, 1992), a sometime government minister and a journalist perhaps best known for her association with the news magazine L'Express. These curricula vitae suggest this volume's range of reference: Giroud and LÇvy follow the thread of love through philosophies of all vintages, cultural politics, and conventional wisdom about contemporary lifestyles. Their ultimate common ground is the literary anecdote, where their discussion achieves a certain universality. One could never have heard of Proust and yet appreciate the verve with which they recapitulate his anatomy of jealousy. This book's accessibility will probably surprise apprehensive English-language readers. The central questions, after all, are familiar to everyone. Have women changed their vocation? Are they truly ``making progress''? Baroque exchanges—about whether women have an intrinsically masochistic relation to men, or about what ugliness really might be—resolve back to more mundane issues. Giroud and LÇvy ask if in this era of divorce we have lost touch with true romance. Is love a melding of two bodies or a battle of two minds? With great shows of reluctance, they draw on personal experience to consider whether love in marriage and fidelity are possible, and to analyze the behaviors of the coquette and the Don Juan. The discussion continually circles back to the central question of the degree to which sexual difference remains entrenched. LÇvy and Giroud relentlessly desiccate each other's clichÇs while appreciating each other's aperáus. They will make agreeable companions for those anglophone readers who don't find their Parisian intellectual millieu too recherchÇ.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-31474-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Gerald Ford comes across here as an average nice guy who was thrust into the hot seat of a banished president and who tried to heal a demoralized nation in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. Greene (History/Cazenovia College; The Nixon and Ford Administrations, not reviewed) mined the Ford Presidential Library's wealth of manuscript material, as well as conducting interviews with Ford himself and others. As a result, we gain a greater understanding of a president burdened by a recalcitrant Congress and bad press, facing one crisis after another: an oil embargo, ``stagflation,'' school integration conflicts, the bankruptcy of New York City, CIA assassination scandals, the invasion of Crete by Turks using NATO arms, the Mayaguez seizure, the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh, the ever-smoldering Middle East powder keg, the Lebanese civil war, an unpopular policy of dÇtente with the Soviet Union, and attacks from the Republican right. The author believes that Ford's honesty and candor performed a great service to the nation, serving as a healing force in the wake of Nixon's presidency, and proved that moral leadership is a necessity in a president. However, Greene argues, Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was the defining act of his presidency; his approval rating dropped from 71% to 50% within a week and remained foremost in people's minds. In foreign policy, Greene states, it's a myth that Ford blindly followed the advice of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and he demonstrated his independence from Congress by vetoing 66 bills in two and a half years. Greene concludes that Ford's successes did not completely heal the nation or restore trust in government, and the Nixon pardon made possible Jimmy Carter's narrow victory in 1976. A fair, balanced account of a troubled time and of a decent man whose efforts left the White House in better shape than he found it.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-7006-0638-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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