A debut political book identifies the dangerous spread of progressive policies in the United States.
Leftist policies are ascendant in the Democratic Party. Liberals are promising voters free medical care, education, food, and housing while arguing that compassion demands that the United States allow millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country. In reality, Merlo asserts, the Democrats are just trying to import new voters to help them turn America into a socialist country—or, worse, a member state in some sort of socialist world government. The author explains the origins of the American left and how it has merged with the Democratic Party, playing upon the resentments of persecuted groups—women, racial minorities, LGBTQ, and the poor—to encourage violence, reopen wounds, and subvert the capitalist order. He then shows the adverse effects of the left’s social policies, some of which are based on questionable findings. He blames the current political state on the nation’s pernicious anti-intellectualism: “Unfortunately, America seems to have rejected aristocracy at the same time it renounced monarchy, and replaced it with antiintellectualism….Intellectually-gifted students are often mocked, and the pretty girls prefer Mr. Touchdown.” Interestingly, Merlo makes a number of arguments that would seem to paint him as an anti-intellectual, or at least someone ill-informed. He claims that Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate in large numbers to the United States because some Muslim men will be driven to assault and rape by the sight of scantily clad American women. He also contends that some of these same women are accusing flirtatious men of impropriety, costing them their careers. Merlo’s prose attempts to present itself as objective but it is filled with odd and sometimes controversial asides: “The resurgence of TB among homosexuals and drug-users (homosexuals are especially likely to use drugs while having sex) was predictable, but, ignored in the name of sympathy for Haitians.” The ambitious book is well-researched and the author includes numerous quotes from other sources. But he sometimes inserts them into the text without full explanations (“I think the alt-left folks are working toward now…chaos, anarchy, and regime overthrow…and we should be alert to their intentions”), referring the audience to a Bibliography. The work ends up reading more like a blog post rant than a polished work of nonfiction.
A strident critique of the left.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1994-2
Page Count: 92
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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