Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.
A contributing editor for Vice delivers on-the-scene, first-person accounts of the Western standoffs involving the Bundy family and their followers.
Pogue, a freelancer for the New York Times Magazine at the time, takes us with him inside the armed camp of those who were protesting the Bureau of Land Management—and the government in general—during the confrontations with the feds in Oregon early in 2016. He met and interviewed the Bundys, became close with a number of those encamped at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and felt his emotions ebb and flow, darken and lighten. A young man from Cincinnati, the author does not ignore his own youthful passions and weaknesses, including accounts of his drinking, drug use, sexual adventures, lassitude, and wanderlust. But he is interested principally in understanding the players in the movement led by the charismatic Ammon Bundy. Some, says Pogue, considered Bundy a prophet (many involved were Mormons), and the author is deeply sympathetic to the notion of increasing public access to public lands. He describes one experience, walking around a New Mexico site, camping, drinking, and firing his gun. (He had bought a big truck and some firearms and confesses a long fondness for both.) Pogue does allow some of his stories to drift past the point of interest, and throughout, he criticizes liberals who, in his view, don’t get what’s going on in the West but nonetheless, in ignorance, disdain it all. He also blasts—again and again—what he sees as the blindness of many Westerners who do not recognize the white male power that lies quietly behind so many of these issues. If public lands are sold off and used for mining and other endeavors, who will benefit? And who will suffer?
Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16912-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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