With violence erupting in Europe and America’s new anti-immigration policies, this audacious work will find its readers.
A timely work that blames Europe’s current immigration disaster on the Europeans’ misplaced guilt and fatally good intentions.
With the massive influx of refugees from the world’s war-torn zones deluging migration points and asylum centers across Europe, Spectator associate editor Murray (Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, 2012, etc.) takes a stance that few dare to take, as it is firmly not politically correct. Indeed, using examples from places he has visited—Lampedusa, Italy, a ferrying point from North Africa; Lesbos, Greece; Berlin; London; and elsewhere—the author surveys the movements of asylum seekers during the last few years especially and the inadequate accommodations for them. He claims, perhaps rightly, that most of the immigrants are Muslim, most are young men with little to sustain them, most are seeking economic betterment rather than asylum from life-threatening causes, and most will disappear through the legal cracks because of the inability of the host countries to process the overwhelming numbers. The result, Murray warns by citing dire demographic numbers, is essentially a dilution of European culture—that is, white Greco-Judeo-Christian culture, which believes in liberalism, secularism, and human rights, including equal rights for women. Instead, the author writes, Europeans, denying their best instincts and led by Germany’s Angela Merkel, are hogtied by “the tyranny of guilt,” in the form of the consequences of World War II, the legacy of colonialism, and the enslavement of indigenous peoples. While the good leaders of Britain, Germany, and other countries claim that their nations need immigration for economic growth and to bolster an aging population, Murray sees “obvious” crises such as housing and school shortages and rapidly increasing health care costs to these welfare states. He also sees “parallel communities” developing everywhere, crucibles of radicalism and crime that the mainstream dares not report due to the fear of political backlash.
With violence erupting in Europe and America’s new anti-immigration policies, this audacious work will find its readers.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4224-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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