Another in the line of books on South Africa that have followed Allen Drury's ``A Very Strange Society'' by seeking to explain the country (or in this case the Afrikaners) mostly by letting people talk. Goodwin, former Africa correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, and husband Schiff (Politics/Oberlin Coll.), have a problem in adopting this technique, because most of their interviews were taped in the period before the Government of National Unity took office, a thoroughly disturbed period by any standard, and the book is filled with dire predictions and threats of what various parties will seek to do to prevent the black control that, as we now know, has actually been in operation for more than a year. (``We'll . . . give them a greater genocide than in the Third Reich,'' says one anonymous source.) With this caveat, the book in its four main sections (the Broederbond, the secret society at the heart of Afrikaner power; religion; the Afrikaans language; and the police state) contains some useful material. Perhaps the freshest is the section on the church, and the authors conclude persuasively that, far from the Afrikaner churches being at the forefront of the reform process, they seem to have followed sluggishly in the wake of government action. Similarly, the authors report recent but little-known research suggesting that religiosity among the Afrikaners is quite new. There are a number of other intriguing insights—that, for example, the Afrikaners are more British than Dutch in their ``way of living and of socialization, of thinking, of communicating.'' But while making it clear that Afrikaners are facing ``a far greater existential crisis than Vietnam was for the Americans,'' the authors provide little clue how these people, now living with a future that many denounced as intolerable, are likely to deal with it. Useful, often thought-provoking, but ultimately flawed and unsatisfactory.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81365-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance...
A showcase of the work of activists and participants in the Stonewall uprising, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary.
With his discerning selections, editor Baumann (editor: Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, 2019, etc.)—assistant director for collection development for the New York Public Library and coordinator of the library’s LGBT Initiative—provides a street-level view of the Stonewall uprising, which helped launch the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. Through his skillful curation, he offers a corrective for what is too often a sanitized, homogenous, and whitewashed portrayal of academics and professionals about the event sometimes termed “the hairpin drop heard around the world.” By gathering vibrant and varied experiences of diverse contributors, the collection reflects the economic, gender, racial, and ethnic complexity of the LGBTQ community at a time when behaviors such as same-sex dancing were criminalized. Featuring essays, interviews, personal accounts, and news articles, Baumann’s archival project accurately and meticulously captures an era of social unrest; the conversation about institutional discrimination and inequality presented here remains as revolutionary today as it did 50 years ago. The anthology invites us to look closely at the unresolved social dynamics of a population defined by its diversity, confronting sexism, racism, classism, and internalized homophobia alongside a broad view of institutional discrimination, heteronormativity, and sexual repression. Voices of significant leaders sit beside stories from participants behind protest lines, police raids, and street harassment, and the mounting frustration with an oppressive status quo becomes palpable on every page. The first-person narratives collected here effectively spotlight the social inequalities surrounding the LGBTQ community, many of which persist today.
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance and Marc Stein’s The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History for a full education on the events before, during, and after Stonewall.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313351-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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