A call to action for those who don’t like the news to make their own.
Populist podcasters offer a manifesto on the failings of mainstream media.
Kilstein is a stand-up comedian, and Kilkenny is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Nation. As married collaborators, they launched Citizen Radio as a shoestring, listener-supported alternative to what they viewed as the omissions, distortions and false equivalencies of better-known news outlets, even those termed “liberal.” They see media in which the moderate middle has shifted to the right, since Democrats are no longer as progressive as Republicans are conservative, and news organizations commonly considered liberal have shirked their watchdog responsibilities during the Obama era. Whatever value Jon Stewart once had in exposing political hypocrisy and malfeasance, they now see him as “at best, an armchair activist’s watercooler conversation starter.” None of their views are likely to surprise anyone or convince someone who disagrees: They are pro-choice vegans who strongly supported the Occupy movement, think adversaries of global-warming activism are delusional at best, consider the drug war a massive resource drain (besides, alcohol is more dangerous, and most of those targeted have been black) and maintain that, for example, there are “way, way, WAY more Palestinians dying in this conflict than Israelis, probably because Israel has the second-greatest army in the world, which is really just the US Military 2.0, thanks to our billions of dollars in subsidization.” Though their analyses tend toward broadsides with occasional punch lines, they make a strong case that a greater range of voices needs to be part of the national media discussion, including theirs. “The people whose voices matter the most are also the least likely to get heard,” they write. “When you turn on the news, it’s the same rich old white people that have systematically ruined this country regurgitating the same tired, stale ideas.”
A call to action for those who don’t like the news to make their own.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0651-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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