The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist.
A critical examination of U.S. immigration policies across the centuries as instruments of racism.
Jones, a professor of geography and environment in Hawaii, reveals that that island state, as well as Puerto Rico, were long excluded from allowing immigrants precisely because both “had large nonwhite citizen populations.” This exclusion followed from a 19th-century policy, born of Jeffersonian tenets at the birth of the republic, that held that the notion of all men being equal applied to White men only, with only “a free white person” eligible for citizenship. Such convictions were common in Jefferson’s day—and in Trump’s. As Jones writes, Reince Priebus, then serving as Republican National Committee chair, warned Trump to tone down his racism during the 2016 campaign “because it could tarnish all of the Republicans running for president,” to which Trump responded by doubling down on his anti-Mexican and then anti-Muslim rhetoric. Jones engages in good investigative journalism to chase down the sources of Trumpthink, given that Trump has never had an original idea of his own, in a complex and “carefully orchestrated effort” to place the racist, exclusionary politics of a century past (pitched largely at excluding Asians from coming to the U.S.) at the center of a new sort of mainstream politics feeding a fearful base. This effort involved the feeding of millions of dollars to anti-immigration groups—$63 million from one donor alone. These groups exalted ideas by the likes of a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who asserted that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority.” By this incisive account, that concept was red meat for the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the latter of whom cut his teeth on the racist politics of former Trump ally Jeff Sessions.
The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5406-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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