Smart and tough: an author with one eye out for the underdog, the other on the sickness of the political and corporate...
From Davis (Magical Urbanism, 2000, etc.), rangy, astute, switchblade-wicked essays ranging from depictions of Los Angeles in film noir to a discussion of a Paiute prophet’s neo-catastrophic epistemology.
September 11 may have marked the end of American exceptionalism, but anxiety was already upon us, writes Davis, and “it is already clear that the advent of ‘catastrophic terrorism’ in tandem with protracted recession will produce major mutations in the American city.” Fear and catastrophe run through this assembly of essays, as seen in the portraits of hell from national and international ecocide sites including Las Vegas, whose apocalyptic urbanism is cooed over by postmodernist philosophers as “virtuality,” and the pharaonic and socially irresponsible redevelopment strategy of downtown LA. As if he were a pair of zoom binoculars, Davis can look hyper-closely at the tortured Compton, a neighborhood about to slip its own tectonic disk, or pull far back into comparative planetology and “an existential Earth shaped by the creative energies of its catastrophes.” Pushy and polymathic, Davis has earned the right call LA’s subway “an aphrodisiac to attract real estate investment to the city’s three largest redevelopment projects,” or to say that the South Central riot “was as much about empty bellies and broken hearts as it was about police batons,” because he has made the connections, a web of such intricacy—racism, vested interests, ecology, social neglect, corruption, real-estate scams, pork-barrel politics, urban dereliction—that it deserves a Tiffany setting. There are moments when readers will wish Davis would cut to the chase, when the writing feels too much like action painting swooning in its own gestures; though there are more moments of salutary humor, as when cold warriors in San Diego managed to find “Kremlin-endorsed hot-rodders and Maoist high school sex clubs” under every grain of beach sand.
Smart and tough: an author with one eye out for the underdog, the other on the sickness of the political and corporate landscape.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-765-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
IN THE NEWS
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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