An evangelical-focused anti-Trump book that carries academic weight.
Masculinity and militarism in the evangelical movement.
History professor Du Mez traces the roles of gender, race, and nationalism through the modern history of the Christian evangelical movement, from the rise of Billy Graham to the election of Donald Trump. “For conservative white evangelicals,” writes the author, “the ‘good news’ of the Christian Gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity.” Faced with the prospect of communism as early as the late 1940s, white evangelicals began espousing a masculinized, even militarized version of Christianity. This trend made heroes out of particularly masculine religious leaders such as Graham as well as outspoken personalities like actor John Wayne. “Through his films and his politics,” Du Mez writes, “Wayne established himself as the embodiment of rugged, all-American masculinity,” and his “masculinity was unapologetically imperialist.” Reacting to societal unrest and rebellion, conservatives such as psychologist James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, advocated for strict discipline of children and patriarchal control of the home through the 1970s and ’80s. With the end of the Cold War, evangelicals turned their attentions to moral issues, fighting liberalism through such mouthpieces as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. After 9/11, evangelicals turned their attention to militant Islam, invigorating the movement because “militant evangelicalism was always at its strongest with a clear enemy to fight.” Barack Obama also provided evangelicals with fodder for activism. “Trump,” writes Du Mez, is “a man whose rugged masculinity was forged in 1950s America, a time when all was right with the world,” and he became “the culmination of [evangelicals’] half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity.” Despite a few moments of overt subjectivity, the well-researched narrative is reasoned and dispassionate. While the author often paints with a broad brush, characterizing white evangelicals throughout as racist, hypernationalistic, and utterly patriarchal, readers not on the fringe right will find it difficult to take issue with her arguments.
An evangelical-focused anti-Trump book that carries academic weight.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-573-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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