by Richard Todd Devens ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2013
Intellectual fodder for like-minded conservatives.
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Devens, in his debut, holds forth on a broad selection of societal ills, inconveniences, inequities and inanities.
This wide-ranging, ambitious book covers a lot of ground, tackling everything from self-righteous religion to syrupy movie sound tracks. The author confidently wades into such thorny issues as criminality, the death penalty, marriage, obscenity and the solicitation of prostitutes. The book treats each polemic pit stop with an air of utmost sobriety and sophisticated reason, even when the arguments come off as rather strident. For example, the author recalls an incident in which he witnessed a disturbed teen masturbate in front of a gorgeous woman on a Brooklyn sidewalk, and he laments that he was not a “dictator” at the time, capable of having the pitiful offender “executed.” There’s little hint of Jonathan Swift when the author advocates cannibalizing convicted murderers: “By devouring the remains of a monster, [victims’ loved ones] can more easily achieve closure...especially when they later go to the toilet to purge the aftermath of the meal from their bodies.” The subjects of racism, torture, performance-enhancing drugs and vigilantism are afforded similar consideration, while the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian dispute is quickly discarded as an example of an unsolvable issue. Devens also enthusiastically defends American troops’ urinating on corpses, and the husbands of ugly women having sex outside of marriage. When batters nail headhunting pitchers in the noggin with line drives, he calls it “poetic justice.” However, Devens sometimes directs arguments at easy targets, such as traffic enforcement agents (or, as the author calls them, “meter maids”); after all, no one enjoys getting a ticket.
Intellectual fodder for like-minded conservatives.Pub Date: May 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1432798802
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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