Didion’s vision is like a searchlight that throws light into dark corners while leaving other areas inexplicably...
Blindingly brilliant—and sometimes just blind—pieces covering a dozen years (1988–2000) of American politics, all originally published in The New York Review of Books.
Primarily, these essays reflect the always-scintillating Didion’s preoccupation with “the process,” or “the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained.” Participants in the process—candidates, political consultants, activists, and commentators—form an echo chamber of conventional wisdom. Unlike other observers, Didion holds no interest in dissecting issues, reporting behind the scenes, or sending up electoral bad taste with Menckenesque glee. Instead, as a novelist and screenwriter, she is fascinated by the “narrative” that political insiders create to explain and often distort events. This fixation simultaneously sharpens and narrows her frame of reference. Her essay “The West Wing of Oz” vibrates with cynical amusement over how the Reagan and Bush I administrations used sleight-of-hand to distract attention from foreign-policy disasters such as Iran-contra. Democrats, she charges, have abandoned their traditional low-income base in an attempt to corral a shrinking electoral center. Often, she files her subjects with astonishing thoroughness. Thus, Newt Gingrich emerges as a captive of management and motivational mantras; Bill Clinton as the son of a traveling salesman who understands “how the deal gets done”; and Bob Woodward as an author of bestsellers “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.” Yet Didion explains nothing about the massive demographic and social changes underlying the two parties’ frantic scramble for the middle; and she sometimes uses high-concept titles that distort as much as the “narratives” she decries (e.g., “Political Pornography” for Woodward’s books, or “Vichy Washington” for the Capitol elite’s disgust with Clinton at the height of the Lewinsky scandal).
Didion’s vision is like a searchlight that throws light into dark corners while leaving other areas inexplicably unilluminated.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41338-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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