A searching memoir by a writer who regrets peddling toxic falsehoods for a living.
Behind the scenes of a notorious far-right media outfit.
Owens spent four years as a camera operator and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars, part of a ragtag team that, he says, endangered Muslims, immigrants, and others by broadcasting “lies” and “racist, xenophobic fear porn.” A nonfiction author with well-deserved credibility issues, he earns points by owning his past: “I was to blame for my actions, unequivocally.” His depiction of his former boss as a shameless fabulist—Jones infamously claimed that a school shooting was faked and was ordered by a court to pay $1.5 billion to the victims’ families—will surprise no one. But as an apparently candid account of falling under a demagogue’s sway, this is substantive stuff. Owens recounts how, per Jones’ orders, he and other Infowars staffers produced reports on terrorism, elections, and human trafficking that powered Jones’ “realm of untruth.” When not shooting footage of staged border crossings or trying to find a purported stateside “caliphate,” Owens says he witnessed Jones assault protesters, punch employees, and “insist” that top Democrats smell like sulfur because “they’re literal freaking demons from hell.” But it’s Owens’ willingness to examine his shifting mindset that makes the book worthwhile. He was initially “passionate about the message I believed Jones was spreading—encouraging people to think outside the box and challenge the status quo.” Covering a standoff between ranchers and Washington, Owens produced a video that garnered a million views and welcomed “unfamiliar feelings of pride, achievement, and self-esteem.” In time, and with encouragement from a perceptive partner who emerges as the book’s conscience, Owens realized that his “moral compass was off,” and that he had to quit. It’s a character arc that feels authentic, a personal story that enhances our understanding of extremism.
A searching memoir by a writer who regrets peddling toxic falsehoods for a living.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781538757321
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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