A timely case study from a war of ideas being waged, ever more intensely, across the nation.
A Peabody Award–winning journalist delivers a frontline account of the right-wing campaign to control public school curricula.
Southlake, a well-to-do Dallas suburb, was an unlikely battleground over public education. “The town’s economic boom ensured the district was flush with resources,” writes NBC senior investigative reporter Hixenbaugh, and that meant plenty of funding for advanced courses that dealt with important matters such as the idea that the Civil War had something to do with slavery. Like the rest of white America, Southlake divided sharply when Barack Obama became the first Black president, and once Trump came into office, a slice of the student body and their parents began to vent racist ideology with gleeful abandon. Arrayed against this group were progressive parents and students who pressed for the Southlake school board to take such actions as declare support for Black Lives Matter and “impose a ban on racist imagery, including the Confederate flag, from all district facilities.” With that, a new civil war brewed, with an inevitable result. “The local fight in Southlake,” writes the author, “had caught the attention of powerful forces in the far-right wing of the Texas GOP—and they’d seen an opportunity.” That opportunity included pouring money into a campaign to turn the school board and district into instruments of the approved right-wing curriculum: no hint of discussion of injustices done to marginalized communities, no hint that America was anything other than a Christian nation, no hint of so-called woke ideas. Hixenbaugh’s account of the battle is detailed and sharp-edged, even if the results are as expected: dedicated teachers forced out of their jobs due to the altered curricula, progressive high school graduates vowing to continue the fight, and smugly satisfied Trumpists in power.
A timely case study from a war of ideas being waged, ever more intensely, across the nation.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780063307247
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.
The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.
Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden—is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668051351
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.
The New York Times columnist serves up a cogent argument for shelving the grudge and sucking it up.
In 1976, Tom Wolfe described the “me decade” as a pit of mindless narcissism. A half century later, Bruni, author of Born Round and other bestselling books, calls for a renaming: “‘Me Turning Point’ would have been more accurate, because the period of time since has been a nonstop me jamboree.” Our present cultural situation, he notes, is marked by constant grievance and endless grasping. The ensuing blame game has its pros. Donald Trump, he notes, “became a victor by playing the victim, and his most impassioned oratory, such as it was, focused not on the good that he could do for others but on the bad supposedly done to him.” Bruni is an unabashed liberal, and while he places most of the worst behavior on the right—he opens with Sean Hannity’s bleating lie that the Biden administration was diverting scarce baby formula from needy Americans to illegal immigrants—he also allows that the left side of the aisle has committed its share of whining. A case in point: the silencing of a professor for showing an image of Mohammed to art students, neither religiously proscribed nor done without ample warning, but complained about by self-appointed student censors. Still, “not all grievances are created equal,” he writes. “There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.” Whether from left or right, Bruni calls for a dose of humility on the part of all: “an amalgam of kindness, openness, and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance.”
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668016435
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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