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THE END OF UTOPIA

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN AN AGE OF APATHY

An ill-spirited but perceptive blast at contemporary political action, ideology, and theory. Jacoby (History/UCLA; Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America, 1994, etc.) argues that we have lost the conception of an absolute goal, a vision of the good, that is necessary for change to take place in society. Absent a belief that the world could be different, it remains the same, and politics degenerates into an uninspiring choice between the status quo and the even worse options of the past. Moreover, the disappearance of utopian faith corrupts personal as well as political life. The infatuation with careerism among today’s students, for example, reflects not an economic collapse, but rather “the collapse of a belief in a future that might be different.” Whether change genuinely requires a reference point outside current reality or can proceed incrementally in reaction to it is debatable, but historically, political dynamism has rested on claims of universal truths used as battering rams against perceived injustices. Jacoby doesn—t make his point and then go forward, however; rather than espousing revolution, he expends his energy attacking the insipid intellectuals of the left who refuse to be revolutionaries. He condemns the “anemic concepts and timid politics of liberal multiculturalism,” the “atrophy of current political thinking,” and the contemporary philosophers who “exchange truth for art appreciation.” Even those who agree with his criticisms will wonder if this hyperbole is really the route to utopia. If Jacoby takes his own argument seriously, is he better served by beating what are—in his mind—dead horses or by making an effort to supply what he believes we lack? Ultimately, this is an irritating book because the valuable central point will surely be lost in the furor over a critique that does not further the author’s stated agenda. This effort does not distance Jacoby from those he attacks.

Pub Date: May 14, 1999

ISBN: 0-465-02000-3

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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