A brief but still highly padded gift to true believers. Anyone else…well, here’s a scowl for you.
Trump, the Campaign Book.
America isn’t winning, writes the author; America is crippled, which makes Trump mad. You can tell because he’s scowling on the cover. His first words are, “some readers may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book is so angry and so mean looking.” Well, it’s because he “wanted a picture where I wasn’t happy,” because it wouldn’t do for him to smile when the U.S. is not winning—and say that word as Charlie Sheen would when you read, “We need a government that is committed to winning and has experience in winning.” Trump lists his qualifications in the third person: “Donald Trump builds buildings. Donald Trump develops magnificent golf courses. Donald Trump makes investments that create jobs. And Donald Trump creates jobs for legal immigrants and all Americans.” How? That’s none of your business, because if he gives you specifics, then he’ll be tipping his hand in the delicate negotiations involved in—well, winning. Thus, Trump complains, President Barack Obama loves a golf game, “but he doesn’t play with the right people.” Who should he play with? Trump’s not going to say, short of, “Believe me, I know how to use a golf course—and golf clubs—to make deals.” So Putin gets a nine iron, and we get the trophy, and all we have to do is accept Trump’s constant refrain: “Believe me….” Specifics are few, but the author’s thoughts come fast and furious all the same: Mexico will have to pay for a wall. Ronald Reagan was a nice guy, able to make us feel “so proud to be Americans.” Throw out Obamacare. And so on. By the end, if you are still unsure about Trump’s many accomplishments, make sure to wade through the 15-page (!) “About the Author” section, which begins, “Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story.”
A brief but still highly padded gift to true believers. Anyone else…well, here’s a scowl for you.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3796-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.
Essayist, novelist and pop-culture guru Gay (An Untamed State, 2014, etc.) sounds off on the frustrating complexities of gender and race in pop culture and society as a whole.
In this diverse collection of short essays, the author launches her critical salvos at seemingly countless waves of pop-cultural cannon fodder. Although the title can be somewhat misleading—she’s more of an inconsistent or conflicted feminist—the author does her best to make up for any feminist flaws by addressing, for instance, the disturbing language bandied about carelessly in what she calls “rape culture” in society—and by Gay’s measure, this is a culture in which even the stately New York Times is complicit. However, she makes weak attempts at coming to terms with her ambivalence toward the sort of violent female empowerment depicted in such movies as The Hunger Games. Gay explores the reasons for her uneasiness with the term “women’s fiction” and delivers some not-very-convincing attempts to sort out what drives her to both respect and loathe a femalecentric TV show like Lena Dunham’s Girls. Although generally well-written, some of these gender-studies essays come off as preachy and dull as a public service announcement—especially the piece about her endless self-questioning of her love-hate relationship with the tacky female-submission fantasies in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yet when it comes to race-related matters (in the section "Race and Entertainment"), Gay’s writing is much more impassioned and persuasive. Whether critiquing problematic pandering tropes in Tyler Perry’s movies or the heavy-handed and often irresponsible way race is dealt with in movies like The Help, 12 Years a Slave or Django Unchained, Gay relentlessly picks apart mainstream depictions of the black experience on-screen and rightfully laments that “all too often critical acclaim for black films is built upon the altar of black suffering or subjugation.”
An occasionally brilliant, hit-or-miss grab bag of pop-culture criticism.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228271-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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