Equally opposed to conservative despair and liberal nihilism, Podhoretz prescribes an optimistic, grateful patriotism as the...
The education and polemics of the eminent editor, literary critic, and neoconservative.
Podhoretz (Ex-Friends, 1998, etc.) edited Commentary for decades and, in parting from the received wisdom of the left, has earned the undying enmity of his erstwhile colleagues and collaborators. Now a 70-year-old sage, he opens his account with an autobiography, describing his forcible early assimilation (administered by his public-school teachers, who put him into a remedial speech class) from the Yiddish ghetto of his parents into the broader culture of American society. He emerged from the melting pot so well done that he was soon off to Columbia and Cambridge on major scholarships. Podhoretz thus believes strongly, from firsthand experience, that bilingual education and multicultural curricula will only serve to impede immigrant newcomers from entering the mainstream of American culture. Once out of Brooklyn, Podhoretz’s years in England and the Continent helped him to focus on the relatively classless charm of the US (where, he claims, even the anti-Semitism is muted). “The anti-Americanism I encountered [abroad] . . . strengthen[ed] my deepening recognition that America was my true home; it also resurrected the patriotic zeal that I had grown up with as a child.” Podhoretz attempts to re-create the America he knew and loved, taking us into his mother’s Depression-era kitchen, sharing his schoolboy poem celebrating America’s victory in WWII, and discussing the works of the many essayists, novelists, critics, and pundits with whom he has locked arms or horns with since 1960. He also sounds the warning against public policies (such as affirmative action) and academic theories (such as deconstruction) that he believes have imperiled American culture and politics.
Equally opposed to conservative despair and liberal nihilism, Podhoretz prescribes an optimistic, grateful patriotism as the best antidote for moral decay.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7432-0051-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to...
An unvarnished account of one woman's painful “journey from victim to survivor,” as she came to understand the “dynamics of commercial sexual exploitation, especially child sex trafficking.”
In this debut, Smith, a public advocate for trafficking victims, begins in 1992 with her own experience. At the age of 14, she was briefly a prostitute before being rescued by the police. Since she was manipulated rather than subjected to violence, she was shamed by the false belief that she had chosen to be a prostitute. Only in 2009, three years after her marriage, did she feel able to reveal her story and give testimony before Congress. She blames the media for objectifying sexuality and creating an environment in which an estimated 100,000 in the U.S. are victimized annually. Smith describes how one afternoon, she was walking through the mall when a young man approached her. They flirted briefly, and he slipped her his phone number, asking her to get in touch. She describes her vulnerability to his approach. She was socially insecure. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and before the age of 10, she had been repeatedly abused sexually by a cousin. In her eagerness to have a boyfriend, she responded to his come-on and agreed to a meeting. As it turned out, he was profiling her for a pimp, and it was the pimp who met her—accompanied by a prostitute, there to show her the ropes. Their approach was nonthreatening, and they suggested that, in the future, she might have a career in modeling. Many unhappy children, writes the author, “are lured into trusting their traffickers” due to their lack of self-esteem. In the aftermath of the experience, although she finished college and had a successful career, Smith struggled with depression and substance abuse.
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to protect them from predators.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27873-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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