A thoughtful, probing look at a national character that is trending ever uglier.
Two Alabaman journalists, one White and one Black, examine the expansion of Southern prejudices into the larger nation.
The Southernization of which journalists Gaillard and Tucker write boils down to racism and White supremacy. This racism has been conservative gospel since at least the Reagan era, when, as one scholar observed, “the views and tools of Southern segregationists had become the official position of the national Republican party.” Chief among those tools are voter-suppression laws to disenfranchise ethnic minorities, and agents of this change include Karl Rove, the master of whispering campaigns that hinted that one Democratic candidate was “a homosexual pedophile”; and the blowhard politico Newt Gingrich, “Donald Trump, but with a higher IQ.” Trump, of course, was an adept follower of Gingrich’s methods: “bitter polarization [and] the combativeness and crude insults that characterize Republican political rhetoric and the tactics of obstruction, including stand-offs over paying the nation’s debts.” However, Gaillard and Tucker show that the true model for Trump was George Wallace, who eschewed Richard Nixon’s “veiled racism” for the real deal, carrying his message of ethnic division and hatred to audiences at rallies across the country, their attendees almost exclusively White blue-collar workers disaffected by the civil rights and anti-war movements. There is another South, of course, and while Trump’s “bigotry, mendacity and sheer incompetence upended a campaign he had expected to be a cakewalk to victory” in 2020, his defeat was caused in part by votes against him in Georgia, Virginia, and the region’s blue urban cores. The struggle will continue, the authors suggest, and likely to bad ends. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. This was Dr. King’s affirmation at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March,” they write. “We are not still sure if we should believe him.”
A thoughtful, probing look at a national character that is trending ever uglier.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-58838-456-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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