A timely contribution to the present election cycle.
A book whose title puts the con in conservatism, exposing far-right politics as a long-running shell game.
“Conservative philosophy demands civic virtue and moral rigor,” writes political journalist Conason, author of Big Lies and Man of the World. Yet “Americans who call themselves conservative are undeniably more susceptible to the multiplying varieties of politically tinged fakery,” including fake cancer cures, Amway soap, NFTs, gold tennis shoes, and MAGA hats made in China. However, notes the author, the con far antedates Trump and Trumpism. His story begins 70 years ago with Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn—Trump’s pre-Giuliani lawyer—who took a junket to Europe putatively to ferret out communists in the State Department but instead holed up in fancy hotels. Cohn traded in hatred and fear, as did the forerunners of today’s right-wing Christian nationalists, “scaring impressionable rubes by the thousands while relieving them of large wads of cash.” A direct path connects Billy James Hargis and Jerry Falwell to Ralph Reed and today’s megachurch supremacists, just as a solid line runs from the self-dealing vandals of the Reagan administration to Sarah Palin, who traded on commercialized fame and monetized ideology, then on to the endless supply of unabashed grifters who continue to loyally serve the MAGA-verse. Conason stops to look deeply into the Trump University swindle, which would seem to be emblematic of Trump-style business writ large. “Grifting may be too mild a term” for their collective crimes, Conason concludes, with the big lie being yet another instrument with which to separate the rubes from their money. The author is intemperate but not shrill, which won’t do a thing to separate Trumpists from their apparent devotion to being played. Still, his righteous, indignant anger makes for oddly entertaining reading.
A timely contribution to the present election cycle.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250621160
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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