An energetic populist manifesto that scores hits on a wide range of targets.
This free-wheeling polemic argues it’s time for Australians to stand up to a corrupt establishment.
Stewart begins by saluting the iconically plucky Australian populace—among them, pre-colonial aborigines, who lived a “culturally rich, refined and satisfying life”; later mavericks, from Robin Hood-like outlaw Ned Kelly to brassy feminist Germaine Greer; and the current crop of ordinary farmers, miners, small businesspeople, and innovators. Keeping this last group down, the author contends, is a rogue’s gallery of pernicious institutions. Pride of place goes to government bureaucrats—Stewart likens them to parasitic aphids. He also attacks the finance industry (“You puffed up, fat lazy arrogant bankers, you should not be proud of stealing the savings of trusting little old ladies”); schools that “force children to…grovel before the power of the state” until they become “frightened little snowflakes”; the “pustule of politicians” in Parliament; “young, green zealots” and their “loony, lazy, Lefty lamentations”; and British aristocrats, whom he calls “deeply flawed and depraved dipsticks” who perpetrated a “genocide” on Australian soldiers by roping them into the world wars. The author’s argument leans right—he’s intensely skeptical of illegal immigration and big government—but he takes on concentrated economic power as well. Stewart lays out a vision of a society that’s autonomous and adaptable, structured not around centralized institutions but families and villages. He offers a raft of policy proposals, some wistful (banning lawyers from Parliament because they have a vested interest in passing complicated laws that provoke suits) and others more serious (the author suggests having companies run by German-style councils with worker representation). Stewart’s punchy prose revels in aggressive alliteration, but he also provides a thoughtful, probing social critique. (“Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.”) The result is a provocative challenge to Australia’s entrenched interests.
An energetic populist manifesto that scores hits on a wide range of targets.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2021
ISBN: 9798782307653
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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