Resolutely, proudly left wing/radical/anarchic with an exuberant optimism that usually keeps the tendentious text aloft.
A professor and social activist for Occupy Wall Street rehearses the history of OWS and of democracy and argues for a more “horizontal” approach to political decision-making.
Graeber (Anthropology/Goldsmiths College, Univ. of London; Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011) describes himself as an anarchist with a small a. He proceeds by moving through the pasture of democratic history and dispatching one sacred cow after another. Among his points: The Founding Fathers didn’t really want democracy; the American economy is designed to keep everyone in debt; organizations with leaders—and with top-down management—can never be democratic; the media are clueless yet wield enormous influence; capitalism doesn’t work; the current American political system is hopelessly corrupt and needs a revolutionary change. Such a change, he argues, was the Occupy movement, in which he was deeply involved, though not, of course, as a leader. Graeber’s text is a mixture of social and economic history, rages against the machine, political judgments (he’s deeply disappointed in President Barack Obama, whom he calls “a moderate conservative”), Q-and-A–style rhetoric and even some professorial pronouncements. His “horizontal democracy” notion is that there are no leaders; groups attempt to reach consensus with only a “facilitator”—one who does not contribute or comment but just moves things along; everyone has the veto power. The groups eschew formal voting and divide into smaller units for nettlesome problems and decisions. The author even offers advice for how to deal with disruptive folks who just won’t get with the program.
Resolutely, proudly left wing/radical/anarchic with an exuberant optimism that usually keeps the tendentious text aloft.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9356-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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