An insightful look at contemporary America.
On road trips across the country, two friends confront their deeply held beliefs.
Making their book debut, former Marine Blashek, now an investor in New York City, and Haugh, a journalist who was an intern in the Obama White House and served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, recount the evolution of their friendship, and their views about America, as they traveled to 44 states over the course of three years. The authors met at Yale Law School, and though they thought one another interesting and sympathetic, they found themselves frustratingly enmeshed in “suffocating ideological debates, politics, and the drawing of lines.” Blashek, a Republican, was quick to defend Donald Trump from attacks, suspicious of Haugh’s liberal stance. Haugh, raised by an activist single mother in Berkeley, “had grown up among protests.” While Blashek believed that Trump’s policy on immigration stemmed from a commitment to protect Americans from criminals, Haugh insisted that Trump was racist and, moreover, stoked racism among his followers. “Disagreements lingered,” the authors write, growing “deeper and more painful” as their arguments intensified. In 2017, with their plans for the future in flux, they decided to set off in search of the nation they felt they hardly knew. Their travels took them to a Trump rally in Phoenix, one week after the Charlottesville incident, where, to their surprise, Trump delivered “a script of unity and hope.” Despite protestors and heavily armed militiamen, they witnessed people engaged in passionate—but respectful—argument, unlike the conflicts reported by the media. “They were actually listening to one another,” the authors note. As they traveled, discovering communities bound by “a deep reservoir of social capital,” they learned that “finding common ground wasn’t about getting to agreement. It was about getting to the point where disagreement didn’t matter as much.” Both men, genial guides, ended their travels with a sense of hope about “how [things] could be if we act together to make it so.”
An insightful look at contemporary America.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-42379-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A sharp, compelling, and impassioned book.
A London-based journalist offers her perspective on race in Britain in the early 21st century.
In 2014, Eddo-Lodge published a blog post that proclaimed she was “no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race.” After its viral reception, she realized that her mission should be to do the opposite, so she actively began articulating, rather than suppressing, her feelings about racism. In the first chapter, the author traces her awakening to the reality of a brutal British colonial history and the ways that history continues to impact race relations in the present, especially between blacks and the police. Eddo-Lodge analyzes the system that has worked against blacks and kept them subjugated to laws that work against—rather than for—them. She argues that it is not enough to deconstruct racist structures. White people must also actively see race itself by constantly asking “who benefits from their race and who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes.” They must also understand the extent of the privileges granted them because of their race and work through racist fears that, as British arch-conservative Enoch Powell once said, “the black man will [one day] have the whip hand over the white man.” Eddo-Lodge then explores the fraught question of being a black—and therefore, according to racist stereotype—“angry” female and the ways her “assertiveness, passion and excitement” have been used against her. In examining the relationship between race and class, the author further notes the way British politicians have used the term “white” to qualify working class. By leaving out reference to other members of that class, they “compound the currency-like power of whiteness.” In her probing and personal narrative, Eddo-Lodge offers fresh insight into the way all racism is ultimately a “white problem” that must be addressed by commitment to action, no matter how small. As she writes, in the end, “there's no justice, there's just us.”
A sharp, compelling, and impassioned book.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7055-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
A lively, highly knowledgeable report on queer culture’s significant contributions to Broadway.
A chronological study of how queer creatives have greatly impacted the theater world.
In his latest book, Mordden, who has written extensively about American and British theater, focuses on the influences of “homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, metrosexuals, and the sexually fluid” on American stage productions throughout the 20th century. The author begins with profiles of high-profile drag queens like illusionist Julian Eltinge and lesbian repertory firebrand Eva Le Gallienne, who, alongside many others, paved the way for gay characterizations and storylines through both “serious drama” and “minty repartee” roles in the 1920s. Another major figure of this time was Mae West. “In a way,” writes Mordden, “she was like a hetero version of your gay uncle, a bank of information about the world that was far more intriguing than anything you heard from your parents.” The author then moves on to discuss Hollywood’s suppression tactics, including the 1927 Wales Padlock Law, which banned any form of “sex degeneracy” from appearing onstage. But the resurgence was swift in subsequent decades as luminaries like Tallulah Bankhead, Harvey Fierstein, and an exhaustive list of others ushered in new sex-positive, gay-identifiable productions like The Boys in the Band, Torch Song Trilogy, The Normal Heart, and Angels in America. Despite its brevity, Mordden’s book is filled with hilariously quippy biographical information—e.g., “portly and owlish” Alexander Woollcott was as gay “as a parade of candy canes”; Joan Crawford “was one of Golden Age Hollywood’s great phallic women”—and contributes uniquely detailed backstage stories from celebrated productions that have continued to shape American theater. As intolerance faded, queer culture thrived, moving well beyond the strict artistic censorship and homophobia that proliferated in the early decades of the 20th century. Gay historians and theater buffs of any persuasion will appreciate this terrific, condensed 100-year retrospective.
A lively, highly knowledgeable report on queer culture’s significant contributions to Broadway.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780190063108
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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