Shapeless and meandering, but full of gritty details and some memorable characters.
Anecdote-rich account of how witchcraft pervades the culture of a stress-ridden region of Africa caught between ancient traditions and modernism.
Palmer, a Canadian journalist working in Ghana to improve investigations of human-rights abuses, became curious about witch camps after she read about them in a 2007 U.S. State Department report. The camps, which in northern Ghana are actually seen as a tourist attraction, began as a kind of sanctuary for people facing beatings or death in their home villages after being found guilty of witchcraft. Today they house thousands of women and a few men in conditions of abject poverty. The author witnessed the judgment process, in which the direction that a slaughtered chicken flops on the ground determines guilt or innocence, and she interviewed women living in the camps, some of whom believed themselves to be witches, people who believed they were the victims of witchcraft, social workers, religious leaders and health providers. Besides detailing the impact of the belief in witchcraft on individual lives, she provides a capsule history of Ghana under British rule, when attempts were made to stifle witchcraft, and she notes the difficulties witchcraft presents for economic development in northern Ghana. Women who have some small success in business arouse jealousy, which leads to accusations of witchcraft from resentful neighbors, which then leads to condemnation and expulsion. Development agencies, Palmer writes, are at a loss about how to help women in the witch camps without increasing their dependency or encouraging the dumping of unwanted wives and burdensome old women by desperately poor families. Interestingly, the author seems to have fallen under witchcraft’s spell. “I still can’t say I believe, but I don’t disbelieve either,” she writes. She also purchased and carried with her a protective travel fetish, and the predictions of a witchdoctor prompted her to make an imprudent life-altering decision. Palmer’s investigation will not persuade skeptics, but her report leaves no doubt that belief in witchcraft is a cultural reality in that part of the world.
Shapeless and meandering, but full of gritty details and some memorable characters.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-2050-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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