A timely history of the American politicians and publicists who have appealed to ``the people.'' Kazin (History/American Univ.; Barons of Labor, not reviewed) shows how populist language has a complicated history, full of irony, paradox, and at times menace. As an academic historian, Kazin shares the disquiet that many of his colleagues have felt in defining populism. On the one hand, there is sympathy for the liberal and inclusive attack on corporate interests and closed government that characterized the great People's Party of the 1890s, the most sustained attack on the two-party system since the Civil War. On the other hand, Kazin recognizes that populist rhetoric, whether liberal or conservative, has often constructed ``the people'' as a group of white males, leaving out women, new immigrants, and African-Americans. Furthermore, there has been a tendency for populists of both the right and the left to engage in conspiracy theories that victimize vulnerable minorities. After setting out the broad emergence of a populist style based on a 19th-century reading of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, Kazin shows how this subtle and flexible language was appropriated by one political movement after another: the People's Party, the Anti- Saloon League, the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Communist Party, and Father Coughlin. Finally, he chronicles the capture of populist language by conservatives, whether Cold Warriors and segregationists like George Wallace, or the Republican right of Goldwater and, later, Reagan and his would-be heirs. Kazin laments the elitism of postNew Deal liberalism, which opened the way, he believes, for a conservative appropriation of populist argument. A solid historical view, slightly deflated by Kazin's muddled speculation on the need for new, inclusive social movements that incorporate the historic language of populism.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-03793-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Krawiec once again plumbs the depths of despair among America's down-and-out in this gritty, powerful second novel. The battered drifters at the heart of his first book (Time Sharing, 1985) have been replaced by a hard-working husband and wife reduced to poverty by a series of calamities. The pair's eldest daughter, Katie, struck down by a mysterious neurological disorder at the age of six, is comatose and requires constant care. Although she is now nearing adolescence, Pat and Timmy have resisted institutionalizing her. The other families in their working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood shun Ellen, the younger daughter, fearful that Katie's illness is contagious. Timmy, out of work for a year, is desperate, angry, afraid. When he stages a mild demonstration at the unemployment office, a vindictive bureaucrat cuts off his benefits. Meanwhile, Pat, certain that she is in some way responsible for Katie's illness, consumed by guilt and by a desperate need to heal Katie, is sinking deeper and deeper into an incoherent anger that her family cannot penetrate. Krawiec describes these lives with sympathy but without condescension, re- creating their spare, often profane speech without making it seem either artificial or repellent. And he doesn't project extraordinary virtue onto his characters: They are well-meaning, often resourceful, frequently finding relief in bawdy humor, but they are also capable of meanness and deceit. The novel's sting, though, is lessened by a piling-on of horrors—so much happens to Timmy and Pat that the plot begins to feel repetitive and contrived. And a subplot about Timmy's involvement in a bungled attempt to kidnap the city's tough-talking mayor is jarring and unpersuasive. Still, Timmy, Pat, and Ellen are so vivid that they survive these lapses, and the modest, hard-won victories that provide the climax of this angry, exact, robust novel feel both believable and just.
Pub Date: March 20, 1996
ISBN: 1-888105-05-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A professional glamour hound ditches his thankless career in magazine journalism and goes on a circuitous quest for spiritual comfort in this surprisingly engrossing, cant-free memoir. As a prized writer and editor at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in the mid-'80s, Matousek hobnobbed with celebrities. But after a few years he began to feel oppressed by the shallow, glittery milieu. He gives a mesmerizing account of the horrifically dysfunctional upbringing that underpinned his malaise: a promiscuous, unstable mother, a father who abandoned the family when the author was four, one sister a suicide, another immensely, miserably overweight, a third mildly crippled and self-loathing. After a stint as a teen hustler, he made it through college and to Andy's Factory. As AIDS continually came closer to Matousek's life, grief and fear were added to his ennui. Finally a British novelist and all-around spiritual prod named Alexander Maxwell recognized Matousek's discontent and dragged him off to India, where he began an ongoing struggle with questions of faith and spiritual practice. Matousek writes matter-of-factly about his intensely unsettling experiences with trances, visions, and the mystical energy of certain gurus, and he is persuasive when relating his trouble relinquishing doubt. The chief distinction of Matousek's spiritual journey is the harrowing background against which it is set: The traumas of his childhood and the surreal sufferings of his friends with AIDS suggest a less hallucinatory echo of David Wojnarowicz's work, as if Wojnarowicz had exchanged his prophet's fury for optimism. Matousek describes his puzzled fascination as he came to terms with both his submerged capacity for sadism and the realization that he'd been the victim of childhood incest; he suggests that all the truths that he has embraced since his quest started have been stepping stones to spiritual enlightenment. The surprise is that Matousek can get away with such New Age musings and make them seem utterly down to earth, even inspiring. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 2, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-032-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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