Extremely disturbing, but, for the brave, jolting and necessary reading.
Prominent social critic Parenti (History as Mystery, 1999, etc.) pens a fierce, elegantly constructed elegy not just for the lives sacrificed in the Balkan wars, but for concepts of national sovereignty and constitutionality, which appear to be lost to a corporate-sanctioned new world order.
Parenti dissents from every piece of conventional wisdom about the former Yugoslavia’s breakup, the Kosovo crisis, and the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbian state in purported support of the Kosovar Albanians. Instead, he assembles a scarily persuasive alternate history in which an American-led coalition backed by aggressive financial interests precipitated the civil war and the profoundly destructive air campaign that killed at least 3,000 civilians. He assumes the difficult defense of the Serbs with gusto, questioning the “publicized size, scope, and frequency of Serbian [war] crimes” and prodding readers to reconsider fundamental notions about the Milosevic regime. (One of Parenti’s many effective tangents addresses the issue of why the US supports certain brutal dictatorships, but not others.) His explorations of Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovar Albanian violence, quasi-fascism, and mediated falsification of wartime reality are shocking, as are his dissections of the KLA’s organized-crime ties and of the roles played by other European nations, principally Germany, in precipitating the crisis. Nor does the mainstream press, especially the New York Times, escape criticism for consistently biased, compromised reportage. Parenti is keenly attuned to the war’s economic implications, postulating that the real target of American-led aggression was Yugoslavia’s efficient socialist system and that post-bombardment recovery prospects are grim. He writes with a taut cadence that exudes conviction. At times he elides opposing viewpoints, the same sin he ascribes to NATO-controlled media and governmental sources, but taken as a whole his work is passionately convincing. Like Thomas Frank’s recent One Market Under God (p. 1443) and Ken Silverstein’s Private Warriors (p. 947), this book raises serious questions about the rise of militarized free-market privatization.
Extremely disturbing, but, for the brave, jolting and necessary reading.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85984-776-5
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Excessive ambition weighs down this important revisionist history of advertising in the United States. Lears (History/Rutgers; No Place of Grace, 1981) argues that modern advertising does not, as most think, promote hedonism but on the contrary serves class and state interest by controlling social energies. In fact, he says, scientific and nationalist myths promoted by advertisers alienate Americans from the potentially subversive pleasures of material objects. Lears casts previous critiques of advertising—in particular those in the sociological tradition of Thorstein Veblen—in a new light, claiming that their puritanical condemnations of consumption further this containment of pleasure. These sophisticated arguments will make a significant impact on cultural studies. The difficulties here arise from Lears's efforts to embed his reflections in a social history of American advertising and a meditation on its relationship to art. Tracing traditional New World themes of magical abundance through the 19th-century era of peddlers and medicine shows, he shows how Protestant values of personal authenticity and plain speech formed an uneasy dialectic with promises of transformation offered by commercial culture. But his narrative dissipates as it moves into a string of meandering mini-biographies of figures like P.T. Barnum, Theodore Dreiser, and Edward Steichen while eschewing the case studies of particular advertisements and their reception that might have lent more weight to his theoretical contentions. In the final chapters he interprets treatments of advertising by novelists from Frederick Exley back to Henry James, concluding with a paean to American artist and ad designer Joseph Cornell. Lears seems to claim that the artistic imagination, high or low, can transcend our culture's dualisms. But these artists, with their fabled neuroses, seem problematic sources for a new vision of everyday life. While Lears's inquiry bears abundant fruit, he has stunted some of his ideas by cramming three books' worth of intellectual goods into one package.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-09076-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Harris still has plenty to learn, but he provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles...
A millennial writer talks about the coming crises his generation will face.
Millennials—defined by the author as those born between 1980 and 2000—have been sold on the idea that if they work hard in school, forfeiting play and creative time for work and sports, and go on to a four-year college, where they continue to work hard, then a solid, well-paying job awaits them once they graduate. But as Harris (b. 1988), an editor at New Inquiry, points out, many in that age group have discovered there is no pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow. In today’s competitive economy, he writes, “young households trail further behind in wealth than ever before, and while a small number of hotshot finance pros and app developers rake in big bucks…wages have stagnated and unemployment increased for the rest.” Those who manage to attend college are often burdened by high student-loan debts, forcing them to work any job they can to pay the bills. Athletes who attend college on a sports scholarship pay with the physical wear and tear on their bodies and the stress of high-stakes games alongside a full academic schedule. Harris also evaluates how millennials interact with social media (a topic that could warrant an entire book on its own), which creates a never-ending link to nearly everything every day, never giving anyone a chance to unwind. Professional musicians, actors, and other performing artists face strong competition in a world where anyone can upload a video to YouTube, so those with genuine talent have to work that much harder for recognition. After his intense analysis of this consumer-based downward spiral, the author provides several possible remedies that might ease the situation—but only if millennials step forward now and begin the process of change.
Harris still has plenty to learn, but he provides an informative study of why the millennial generation faces more struggles than expected, despite the hard work they’ve invested in moving ahead.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-51086-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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