A fascinating way to look at the fracturing of a nation presumed to be united; it’s one that offers little hope for less...
Big data comes to the service of big generalizations about American tribes, and it speaks volumes about how we divide along many fronts, not least of them political.
As University of North Carolina–based political scientists Hetherington and Weiler (co-authors: Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, 2009) write, if you’re a conservative, you’ll tend to buy an American-made truck and have a dog, whereas if you lean left, you’ll have a cat and a hybrid or foreign-made passenger vehicle. The causal relationships are a little fuzzy, but a look at the amygdala shows that conservatives tend to be more certain that danger lurks just around the corner and more attuned to survival—thus the big growling vehicle and the big growling dog. Liberals, conversely, tend to think that people are inherently good and that the world is mostly a safe place. By the authors’ account, most people are neither wholly conservative nor wholly liberal in their worldviews, though their positions tend to harden when confronted with someone who doesn’t agree with them; there are reasons for that as well, some of them related to media diet, the subject of an engaging side discussion. The resulting “politicization of everything” plays out everywhere: If you’re a lefty, you’ll head to Starbucks, if a righty, to Dunkin’ Donuts; if you’re a Hillary Clinton voter, you’ll watch tennis instead of football, if you watch sports at all. That said, there are limits: “For their part, the Redds don’t watch football with the same relish anymore. They’re sick and tired of the fact that everything is a political issue now and don’t believe the anthem, in particular, should be one.”
A fascinating way to look at the fracturing of a nation presumed to be united; it’s one that offers little hope for less polarization anytime soon.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-86678-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.
The ably reconstructed story of the author’s convoluted escape from North Korea, detailing the hardships of life there and the serendipity of flight.
A supremely determined young woman, Lee chronicles her life in North Korea and her defection in her late teens in 1998. With the assistance of co-author John, she re-creates a picaresque tale of incredible, suspenseful, and truly death-defying adventures, which eventually led her to asylum in South Korea and then America. The author grew up largely in the northeast province of Ryanggang, bordering the Yalu River with China, and her family home was in Hyesan. Her father was a privileged member of the military, and her enterprising mother was a successful trader on the black market. The family, including younger brother Min-ho, did not endure the hardships of famine like people of low songbun, or caste, but the author learned that her father was not her biological father only shortly before he died by suicide after being trailed by security, beaten, and imprisoned in her mid-teens. Her mother had previously married and divorced another man. At age 17, the lights of China, directly across the river, beckoned, and the author managed to cross and establish contact first with a trading partner of her mother’s, then dissident relatives of her father’s in Shenyang. While the author had no intention of leaving her mother, it was apparent that it was too dangerous for her to return. Her relatives shielded her for a few years, trying to arrange a marriage with a wealthy Korean-Chinese man, from whom the author fled at the eleventh hour. Working as a waitress in Shanghai afforded some invisibility, though she was always susceptible to con men and security police. As the narrative progresses, the author’s trials grow ever more astounding, especially as she eventually tried to get her mother and brother out of North Korea.
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755483-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
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