A work of serious intent that is certain to arouse controversy.
Scholarly analysis of the American national identity as it has evolved over the centuries, the challenges it now faces, and the choices that lie ahead.
Huntington (History/Harvard; The Clash of Civilizations, 1996, etc.) argues that Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions, and values and the principles of the American Creed—liberty, equality, law, individual rights—have made this country what it is. In recent decades he sees doctrines of multiculturalism and diversity elevating racial, ethnic, and gender over national identity, and an increased tendency of immigrants, especially Hispanics, to maintain dual identities rather than to assimilate. The result is an emerging bilingual, bicultural society fundamentally different from the one of the three previous centuries with its Anglo-Protestant, English-language core. Controversies over racial preferences, immigration, and an official language are, he notes, battles in a single war over national identity, with substantial elements of the country’s elites in academia (himself not included), the professions, and the media on one side and the general public on the other. Huntington bolsters his analysis with impressive statistics, and he assembles persuasive examples to illustrate the changes he sees taking place. To the question of whether a nation lacking a cultural core can define itself by ideology alone—that is, can America be a coherent nation if the American Creed is its sole source of national identity?—his answer is a firm no. A nation’s soul, he states, is determined by a common history, traditions, and culture. As to where we go from here, he sees the world entering a new age of religion, one in which the nation’s ideological war with militant communism has been replaced by a religious and cultural war with militant Islam. He outlines three possible approaches to the country’s role in the world: cosmopolitanism, in which the US welcomes the world, its ideas, its goods, and its people; imperialism, in which the US is the dominant component of a supranational empire reshapes the world; and nationalism, in which the US does not try to eliminate the social, political, and cultural differences between itself and other societies but seeks to preserve and strengthen its own defining qualities. Elites may favor cosmopolitanism or imperialism, but most Americans, Huntington says, are, like him, patriots committed to nationalism.
A work of serious intent that is certain to arouse controversy.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-87053-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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