Throughout much of our history, minor candidates have jumped into the lake of presidential politics, some making a splash.
In his latest, screenwriter, playwright, and author Stein (Vice Capades: Sex, Drugs, and Bowling From the Pilgrims to the Present, 2017, etc.), whose 2008 book How the States Got Their Shapes was adapted into a History Channel series, focuses on American politicians—well, sort-of politicians. Beginning in 1848, the author escorts us through the election cycles, pausing to focus on a particular fringe candidate, providing a bit of background on the candidate and speculating about what that person’s candidacy told us about ourselves—and what it could bode for the future. Some of the names will be familiar to most readers, including Joseph Smith, Victoria Woodhull, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Pat Paulsen, Eldridge Cleaver, Stephen Colbert, and Roseanne Barr. Yet other names—and nicknames—will doubtless be new to most: Leonard “Live Forever” Jones, who claimed to be immortal; Gabriel Green, who represented the Universal Flying Saucer Party; Pigasus, a domestic pig put forth by the Youth International Party in 1968; Vermin Supreme; and the Naked Cowboy. Stein treats each candidate with a rubber band of seriousness—for some, there are stretches—and quotes liberally from various sources, both print and online. The author also deals with a variety of “firsts”—the first woman, the first African American, the first “transhumanist,” and so on. He discusses how the internet and social media have propelled a number of folks into presidential prominence, including “Deez Nuts,” who turned out to be a teenager from Iowa. The author’s tone varies throughout, from amused to ironic to admonitory. Donald Trump lumbers in from time to time, but, as Stein notes, he is hardly the first to be called “the clown in the White House”: Lincoln, for one, preceded him.
Informative and entertaining, forcing American readers to take some glances into what at times is an unflattering mirror.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64012-032-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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