A precisely written critique of cultural manipulation in our daily lives.
How persuasive cultural mechanisms are encoded in broader social structures, from high art to war-planning.
Thompson (Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century, 2015, etc.) confidently casts a wide net in his discussion, seeing hidden hands of artifice and marketing that have long manipulated the citizenry. “I want to explain the ways in which those in power have to use culture to maintain and expand their influence,” he writes, “and the role that we all play in that process.” The author supports this ominous claim with a historical timeline and various categories of real-world occurrences, first focusing on the early “persuaders” of advertising and public relations and then looking at diverse examples, from lifestyle corporations like Apple and IKEA to the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency theorists. Thompson first argues that the 1980s “culture wars” over art and funding provide a lens for understanding cultural manipulation within politics: “A number of forces were learning to utilize the power of culture to push forward their own agendas.” He then looks further back to 1914, arguing that the Ludlow massacre of striking miners led John D. Rockefeller to develop innovations in public opinion–shaping that became widespread during World War I. During the 1920s, wartime propaganda morphed into the modern advertising and polling industries, embodied by George Gallup, who founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935. As Thompson notes regarding Gallup’s prescience, “if he could predict elections, what else could he do?” Yet simultaneously, artistic collectives and radical groups were recognizing the power of the same techniques, and the author explores topics from Dada and Andy Warhol to Saul Alinsky and the Black Lives Matter movement. Thompson characterizes our own time as deeply fearful, tying the racist politics of Lee Atwater’s “Southern Strategy” to current controversies around mass imprisonment and police overreach. The author moves effortlessly between subtopics and tautly addresses particular oppressive social mechanisms, yet his focus on the pervasiveness of persuasion feels unsurprising.
A precisely written critique of cultural manipulation in our daily lives.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61219-573-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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