It’s not Hunter S. Thompson, and O’Rourke has been funnier, lots funnier—but then again, it may just be that our current...
Tossed-off bons mots on “this obnoxious political spectacle, the election of 2016.”
Longtime political satirist O’Rourke (Thrown Under the Omnibus, 2015, etc.) surprised observers during the 2016 cycle by weighing in, if without much enthusiasm, for the Democratic candidate—not to be expected for someone who had long identified with a kind of country-club conservatism. Considering what the Republicans had to offer, that’s not really such a surprise, for O’Rourke has also long prided himself in contrarianism. Still, the author seems as much taken aback as any civilian by the spectacle that saw Donald Trump skyrocket over the preferred candidates, notably Jeb Bush, who, after all, was governor of Florida, “where balloting incompetence and corruption are vital to the GOP.” One by one, O’Rourke examines the slate as, one by one, they fall: Chris Christie is a chump who makes bad suits look worse, Rick Perry a dimwit whose effort at wearing glasses to look intellectual convinces no one, Marco Rubio merely “the least insane candidate.” Where O’Rourke hits hard on a mark, it seems almost accidental. His random remarks on Hillary Clinton’s manner, for instance, eventually add up to a rather deft analysis of how the elite class operates, while the insurgencies surrounding both Trump and Bernie Sanders are two faces of the same coin, species of “internecine warfare [that] brings forth the worst from both sides.” Still, even in the bloodletting and shambles, the author finds room for optimism: after all, we’re not as fragmented as in 1861 (“that was polarized”), and he even ventures the view that our divisions and manifold special interests may mean that American voters “are becoming persons, not masses.”
It’s not Hunter S. Thompson, and O’Rourke has been funnier, lots funnier—but then again, it may just be that our current political situation is no laughing matter.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2619-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
IN THE NEWS
A liberal tries to straddle the fence, in a harsh, often trite polemic geared to enrage multiculturalists, feminists, affirmative activists, and others. Even liberals who secretly harbor doubts about whether a lack of ethnic pride is what underlies the difficulties of black children in school will find little succor from Henry (a Pulitzer Prize winner and a columnist for Time who died this summer at the age of 44). Even those who criticize the belief that all values and ideas are equally worthy will be offended by his writing, regarding the relative worth of cultures, ``It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.'' In defending elitism as an individualist philosophy that demands the best from each person and rewards those with the greatest achievements, Henry slaughters every sacred cow of the left. Affirmative action, he claims, is as unfair to its beneficiaries as it is to white men, breeding doubt in minority employees whether they were hired for their abilities or to fill a quota. As for feminism, ``forty-six percent of the nation's financial managers are women,'' so what are they still griping about, he wonders. Educated mothers should stay home: ``A live-in nanny clearly represents an intellectual step down for the child,'' since she is probably not college-educated. (But even card-carrying feminists will relish his quotes from some rather laughable scholarly feminist works, for instance, one about the impact of ``masculinism'' on the study of geography.) The gaps in Henry's logic are often glaring. He believes in equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, but he wants less academically successful students to be tracked into vocational education at an early age. And in espousing Oregon's health-care reform package—which even the Bush administration rejected as discriminatory against the disabled—on the grounds that some lives are more valuable to society than others, Henry begs the whole question of the worth of human life. An infuriating screed that will alienate even those liberals seeking a coherent and well-argued defense of intellectual rigor and reward for merit.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-46899-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A brief but thoughtful essay outlining the terrible misapprehensions that led to escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union from the close of WW I to the end of the Korean conflict. Although anti-Bolshevik feelings ran high even at the time of the Russian Revolution, fear of the USSR didn't dominate American foreign policy until after WW II. Drawing on materials newly available from Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives, Leffler (winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize for A Preponderance of Power) deftly traces the history of US-Soviet relations in prÇcis, from the Bolsheviks' rise to power through the uneasy truce in Korea. Begining as an ideological clash, the tension between the two nations only gradually became a power struggle as well. Indeed, it was only when the USSR became a player on the same global scale as the US (albeit considerably weaker in key strategic areas after the pounding it took during WW II) that the Soviets were perceived as an active threat abroad. On the other hand, seen through the distorting mirror of obsessive anti-Communism, domestic American radicals were regarded as a danger almost from the first murmur of the word ``Bolshevik'' in the popular press, and it was the specter of homegrown subversion rather than foreign invasion that haunted American policies for a long time. Leffler retells this often familiar material methodically, using the new documentation to reveal Stalin as hesitant and tentative in foreign policy, primarily concerned with erecting a security buffer around Russia rather than building an evil empire. The portrait that emerges is of two superpowers-in-formation engaged in a grim dialogue of the deaf, with terrible consequences for humanity. Although much of the ground covered is well trod, this is an admirably complete introduction to the history of the Cold War.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8090-8791-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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