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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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