Vintage Carter, with his always-welcome emphasis on family, place, and the way it really was. Perfect for gift-giving.
From the former president, seasonal reminiscences recalling Christmases past, with tempered nostalgia and beguiling frankness.
Most of the territory is familiar from Carter’s previous memoirs (An Hour Before Daylight, 2001, etc.), but by highlighting the observances of a particular season in places that range from his Georgia hometown to Camp David, Carter infuses them with a fresh sensibility. He begins in the 1930s, when as a young boy he would go out into the woods with his father Earl a few days before Christmas and bring home the perfect red cedar to decorate. As he and his father searched for the tree, they also gathered sedge to make brooms as gifts for family members. Decorations were homemade; gifts were clothes (dreaded) and books (much more welcome); celebrations were rounded off with a fireworks display. Sensitive as usual to the conditions of African-Americans at the time, Carter recalls how his black neighbors celebrated. The local church was the center of their festivities on Christmas Day, the pine tree growing outside was decorated with small presents, and the children had to give recitations before they received their gifts. Family has always been important to the author; even when president, he and Rosalyn managed to get back to Plains for the day itself. As he recalls past Christmases, Carter also briefly sketches the appropriate background: his years at the Naval Academy, his marriage, and his decision to go into politics. He describes Christmases in the Navy (one on a submarine mistakenly reported to have gone down in bad weather near Pearl Harbor), during his terms as governor in the newly decorated mansion in Atlanta, and at the White House. Events in Iran increasingly shadowed the holiday as he worked until the last moments of his presidency to set the hostages free.
Vintage Carter, with his always-welcome emphasis on family, place, and the way it really was. Perfect for gift-giving.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-2491-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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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