Polemic arguing that the Democratic Party is headed for the dustbin of history because the core electorate—the white middle- class—perceives it as dominated by minority concerns. Brown, chief political writer for Scripps Howard News Service, says the Democrats are hiding from an unpleasant truth they've long known: that the white middle-class blames them for the welfare society, for reverse discrimination coming out of affirmative action, and for crime. Furthermore, Brown argues, many whites perceive Democrats as ``cater[ing] to racial minorities, the poor, and the elite liberal whites who [run] the party''—in other words, ``paying for the other guy.'' With a torrent of statistics and opinion-poll results, interviews of politicians, and folksy portraits of a few former Democrats who quit the party in disgust, Brown identifies a tremendous white backlash driven by prejudice, fear, and wounded self-interest and argues that liberal guilt is dead. The working class, he says, has been absorbed into the middle-class; union voting blocks are shrinking; and machine politics don't operate in the suburbs where the white middle-class has moved. Fed reality via a flickering TV screen and rootless after changing suburbs every few years, such white voters—by ``simple math'' the largest voting bloc—buy the Republican message of economic self-interest, Brown argues. If he's right, the Democrats, ignorant of such demographics, will continue to lose the presidency and will soon lose their control of Congress and state and local governments. Brown, far from impartial, will be wide open to charges of promoting the racism he describes. And there's a perversity to his implied thesis that Democrats can't win unless they become even more indistinguishable from Republicans. Moreover, like the GOP, Brown doesn't discuss the S&L debacle, deficits, or any evidence counter to his claim that the GOP serves the economic self-interest of the middle class.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1991
ISBN: 0-89526-530-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The much celebrated master of nonfiction works his magic on Macbeth, using the ingredients of a mere monograph to conjure a vision of politics, theology, and theatrical practice in King James's England. Wills, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), argues that Shakespeare's Macbeth should be understood in the context of the contemporaneous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. This attempt to blow up England's king and Parliament gripped the British imagination then much as the Red Menace and the assassinations of the 1960s dominated postwar American consciousness. Wills frames his examination of Macbeth with such parallels. The heart of his book, which grew out of lectures given at the New York Public Library, shows how the play bristles with the ideology prevalent in the Plot's aftermath, when King James and his spokesmen condemned the Jesuit-led rebellion using metaphors of witchcraft. Wills juxtaposes close readings of the play's language, imagery, and stage history with details of the Plot's representation in propaganda and popular culture. Shakespeare's famous witches take center stage as Wills shows how they draw the regicide Macbeth into their circle. Explicating Shakespeare's demonization of verbal ``equivocation,'' purported to be the Jesuitical method for dissembling in an unfriendly realm, Wills forges a new understanding of the play's second half. He justifies its attentions to the witch Hecate and to the Scottish prince Malcolm as crucial to Shakespeare's exploration of rituals of truth in demonology and kingship. Envisioning Macbeth as an integrated rhetorical presentation of a theological politics, Wills hopes, will enable us to once again find theatrical power in the whole play—especially given the neat conjunction of England's 160506 crisis with our contemporary obsessions about plots and princes. Wills's latest essay portends a renewed Macbeth for the theater; his critical performance, meanwhile, manifests the power of literary criticism that is simultaneously scholarly and popular.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508879-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet call for the unsullied love of children that frequently derails under the weight of dubious argument.
Forget Iran and North Korea. The locus of evil is the institution of the family, says poet Stannard, who died in 2004.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin. Stannard heartily agrees: The dominant-submissive arrangement crushes children, preempting their need for security and affection and stifling their healthy anger, punctuating their days with episodes of verbal and physical abuse. Children become little engines of hate, says the author (though hate can also have positive value, expressing indignation and a sense of self-love). As a child, the author suffered sexual abuse and was the constant victim of her mother’s cruel scorn. The author’s expressiveness testifies to an inner voice, a self-helper, bringing an awareness of suppressed grief and forgotten wounds. She tenders an unrestrained critique of the Bible as a how-to guide for vindictiveness and violence, a reflection of “a corrupt and brutal mankind,” with its God “the biggest hater of them all.” She also calls out Sigmund Freud for back-pedaling when he abandoned sexual trauma as the source of hysteria. Eventually, her broad generalizations detract from her message: Yes, the family can be an abomination, and yes, it’s certainly plausible that hate is often the manifestation of a hurt, frightened child. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that “happy families are largely a mirage,” treating children as “inferior species” and “losers.” The author is also prone to such ridiculous statements as, “that the great Gandhi mistreated his children only proves that parents don’t know how to bring up children.”
A sweet call for the unsullied love of children that frequently derails under the weight of dubious argument.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 20.00
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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