It has its moments, but this belongs at the bottom of the stack of recent books on the madcap world of QAnon.
Who is Q, and how did QAnon’s bizarre brand of “hermetically sealed, self-imposed ignorance” seize the minds of so many Americans?
“A good conspiracy theory that seems plausible and frightening enough can be worth more than a thousand well-reasoned stump speeches,” writes Guffey in this tour of the wacky world of QAnon, a mélange of conspiracy theories neatly packaged for right-wingers, fundamentalists, and lonely hearts who lack a credulity gene. “If you can convince thousands of full-grown adults to accept an oafish boor like Donald J. Trump as God’s ‘Anointed One,’ you can get these rubes to accept almost anything or anyone,” writes the author. As with all successful conspiracy theories, Guffey notes, its proponents are masters at explaining away any contradictions. At the same time, QAnon has enough silliness to it that one suspects that it’s an elaborate satire, although true believers don’t take it as such. Indeed, the author posits that Trump may be a victim of his own press, believing, per one of the dumber QAnon tropes, that he alone is capable of preventing his followers “from being eaten by demons.” Guffey’s dive is mostly at the shallow end of the pool; readers interested in the red meat of QAnon will want to read Mike Rothschild’s The Storm Is Upon Us or Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko’s Pastels and Pedophiles instead. Still, Guffey does a reasonably good job of teasing out the history of some of QAnon’s wilder threads, many of which owe to 19th-century antisemitism and fears of a new world order foisted upon innocents by the evil Illuminati. In that, QAnon has much in common with Scientology and other shopping-mall religions but with modern twists—sex dungeons disguised as pizza parlors, demons disguised as Democrats, and such.
It has its moments, but this belongs at the bottom of the stack of recent books on the madcap world of QAnon.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68219-331-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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