Interesting and enjoyable reading for the election year, with a bonus story among many other presidential narratives: the...
George Washington threw a dollar coin across the Delaware, George Dubya, the onetime “Texas Prince Hal yearning to become Henry V,” throws missiles at Iraq. Who can tell how the spin will play?
Writes Cornog, associate dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, once-upon-a-time stories sell candidates and make legacies, and any president worth his salt has taken great pains to see to it that his story—the “crafted presidential narrative” of the subtitle—is shaped and then told to maximum advantage. Nixon got it right (thanks in large part to then-speechwriter and now apostate conservative Kevin Phillips) when he ran with the notion that he was representing the “silent majority,” the nonprotesting, law-abiding taxpayers of Anytown USA; through Nixon’s dogged sticking to that very story, writes Cornog, “the term ‘silent majority’ successfully established itself in public discourse, doing its master’s bidding faithfully.” Nixon got it wrong before that selfsame court of public opinion when, on his way out the Oval Office door post-Watergate, he snuffled that no one would write a book about his sainted mother, an episode that more Americans are inclined to remember about the fallen president. It’s all wheel-of-fortune stuff: as Cornog provocatively notes, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq may have in some regard been an effort to rewrite the ending of his father’s administration, which isn’t remembered for much of anything save squandering victory in the first Gulf War, and that wheel is still in spin; we could end up with two bad stories, not one. And though Americans, Cornog asserts, like fairy tales, like to hear that their president enjoys “the happy family that we all wish were true of our own,” they don’t much enjoy excessive moralizing—which is why the nation never really loved Jimmy Carter but was inclined to forgive Bill Clinton his indiscretions and Ronald Reagan his dopiness.
Interesting and enjoyable reading for the election year, with a bonus story among many other presidential narratives: the origins of the Baby Ruth candy bar.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-022-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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