by Howard Harrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2017
Not everyone will agree with Harrison’s political take, but his entertaining re-creation of the campaign makes for an...
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The 2016 presidential election campaign was a firestorm of partisan vitriol and crazed Trumpery, according to this energetic, opinionated recap.
Journalist Harrison (NOW They Make It Legal: Reflections of an Aging Baby Boomer, 2015) delivers a week-by-week, tweet-by-tweet narrative of the campaign from the first ominous rumblings in the summer of 2015 through Election Day 2016 and its denouement of competing fraud and conspiracy allegations. His main theme is the anatomy of a body politic, split by innumerable fissures: between Republican candidates; between Trump and Fox News broadcaster Megyn Kelly; between the Republican establishment and the Trump-ian base; and between Hillary Clinton’s Democratic establishment and the Bernie Sanders insurgency. He also looks at the conflicts between minorities and resentful white people; between cops and protesters; between Trump and women, Trump and the press, Trump and the Pope, Trump and Trump; and ultimately between the Republicans and Democrats, the only division that really counts in the author’s telling. His account is lucid, well-paced and evocative. For example, Trump, in a debate, is described as being “like an angry bear with a permanent scowl on a pronounced pouty face.” Harrison’s focus is on campaign ephemera—name-calling, publicity stunts, ill-advised statements, and grudging retractions—and he covers them all adroitly, from Mexican-bashing to the climactic revelation of an Access Hollywood recording. But he also fills in background news developments, such as intermittent terrorist attacks, and does cogent deep-dives into central issues, such as immigration and gun control, to try to separate fact from rhetoric. An avowed liberal Democrat, Harrison wears his own politics on his sleeve, soap-boxing for a single-payer national health system and against religion—which he calls “the biggest fraud ever perpetrated by mankind”—and he makes no secret of his chagrin at Trump’s success. (He dings Clinton for missteps, as well, but generally is softer on her.) Still, he manages to get the facts straight while charting a clear path through the chaos.
Not everyone will agree with Harrison’s political take, but his entertaining re-creation of the campaign makes for an absorbing read.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4575-5403-2
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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