An elucidating, nuanced study of gender and feminist dynamics perfect for our current political moment.
A timely study of gender and media that reaches back before the present American election to earlier delineations of white manhood and presidential power.
In this astute study, Katz (Leading Men: Presidential Campaigns and the Politics of Manhood, 2012, etc.), a journalist, documentarian, and scholar on gender and violence, asserts that long before Hillary Clinton battled single-handedly the slew of male presidential candidates, cultural ideas about gender spurred U.S. presidential campaigns, beginning with the watershed year of 1972. Presidents, argues the author, not only command material power (e.g., as commander in chief), but also symbolic power, as the “living embodiment of the nation.” Alpha males like Theodore Roosevelt notwithstanding, the landslide victory of incumbent Republican Richard Nixon over Democratic Sen. George McGovern in 1972 cleverly realigned gender politics by underscoring the “flight” of white, working-class men from the party traditionally associated with their concerns (e.g., New Deal coalition) to align with the party slyly capitalizing on pressing issues of patriotism and law and order. Indeed, Nixon wooed the “silent majority” by casting aspersions on the manliness of McGovern and his “hippie fags,” the counterculture liberals, and anti-war protesters who had gone “soft” and “feminine.” This was the beginning pattern in competing versions of masculinity used very effectively by the GOP, as Katz traces, from subsequent campaigns: Ronald Reagan vs. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush, John Kerry vs. George W. Bush, and John McCain vs. Barack Obama. In all cases, the Republicans portrayed themselves as vigorous and combative, while Democrats were cast as wimpy and emasculated. As evidenced by the 2012 election, however, the white, working-class male finds his electoral majority shrinking alarmingly—hence, the appeal of Donald Trump. Especially as social media has helped inject women’s voices into the national debate, Katz points out how Hillary Clinton’s rise as a powerful fighter has refreshingly reshuffled these long-held definitions.
An elucidating, nuanced study of gender and feminist dynamics perfect for our current political moment.Pub Date: July 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56656-083-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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