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ON COMPROMISE

ART, POLITICS, AND THE FATE OF AN AMERICAN IDEAL

A thoughtful, defiant polemic that should provoke heated discussions.

A literary scholar and cultural critic argues that democracy is better served by hashing out conflicts than by compromising.

Ranging widely in art, literature, popular culture, philosophy, and politics, Smith mounts an impassioned critique of compromising, which she insists is “unsatisfying, awkward, boring, haphazard.” Compromises, she writes ruefully, “might be the best we can get, but they do not and should not please us.” Although she admits that compromises are sometimes necessary, she rejects them “as a value, as a way of appealing to moderation” and avoiding radical solutions. They are designed to preserve the status quo of hierarchies and power. “People do lose in all compromises,” she asserts; “it’s just a matter of who feels it.” Accused of being “hostile, critical, even mean” when talking with people whose ideas she opposes, Smith admits that she is drawn to “uncompromising figures”—such as editor Margaret Anderson, who advertised her modernist literary magazine Little Review as aesthetically uncompromising, or even far right icon Ayn Rand—and to illiberal forms, “from the polarizing rhetoric of manifestos to the brutality of minimalist sculpture, from the strident aesthetic of punk to the categorical abstraction of the Russian avant-garde.” The author praises those willing to take strong stands, change their minds, and argue forcefully for a new position rather than those who believe “that unsatisfactory things can be made satisfactory, at least temporarily. That the pain and loss generated by a bad situation can be managed, or made fair, or tolerable, even if the underlying conflict remains.” Democracy, she asserts, is messy and contentious; it involves confronting pain and realizing the limits of our ability to solve every problem with a compromise. Democracy suffers “when we are asked to compromise on our principles in advance in order to be practical, palatable, or unthreatening to those who want to maintain systems of injustice.”

A thoughtful, defiant polemic that should provoke heated discussions.

Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64445-060-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021

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THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.

In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

Pub Date: April 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780593536131

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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