Churchwell demonstrates a lively intellect, as she exhibited early in her publishing career with The Many Lives of Marilyn...
Investigating two ubiquitous yet murky expressions—“America First” and the “American Dream”—through “a genealogy of national debates” that surround them.
Churchwell (American Literature /Univ. of London; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, 2013, etc.) introduces these ill-defined concepts and then uses broad historical research to demonstrate their intersections during portions of the last three centuries. Although the detailed narrative ends in 1941, the author offers an epilogue covering the years 1945 to 2017, mostly focused on Donald Trump and his associates. Churchwell demonstrates that when the concepts of the American dream and “America First” arose in the culture and the language of the U.S., those terms tended to signify the opposites of their meanings today. At any given moment, each term has been linked, for better or worse, to the American concepts of democracy, capitalism, and racial equality—or inequality, as the case may be. Churchwell acknowledges her preferred definitions, but she mostly avoids moral judgments in favor of pointing out shifting historical trends. So when Trump (or others) talk about “America First” or the American dream, their crabbed definitions may have different connotations than in previous decades. For example, “America First” has, at times, suggested isolationism from the remainder of the world, especially leading up to the world wars. At other times, it has suggested unthinking patriotism or even implied racism due to the desire for a whiter population. As for the American dream, Churchwell shows persuasively that, initially, it signified opposing the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, since business moguls rarely cared about the well-being of society as a whole. In 2018, however, it seems many Americans aspire to unabashed self-enrichment.
Churchwell demonstrates a lively intellect, as she exhibited early in her publishing career with The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004). The only weakness of this book, which provides much food for thought, stems from generalizations about the way “most Americans” define the two key concepts. That knowledge is, of course, ultimately unknowable.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7340-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.
Former Dirty Jobs star Rowe serves up a few dozen brief human-interest stories.
Building on his popular podcast, the author “tells some true stories you probably don’t know, about some famous people you probably do.” Some of those stories, he allows, have been subject to correction, just as on his TV show he was “corrected on windmills and oil derricks, coal mines and construction sites, frack tanks, pig farms, slime lines, and lumber mills.” Still, it’s clear that he takes pains to get things right even if he’s not above a few too-obvious groaners, writing about erections (of skyscrapers, that is, and, less elegantly, of pigs) here and Joan Rivers (“the Bonnie Parker of comedy”) there, working the likes of Bob Dylan, William Randolph Hearst, and John Wayne into the discourse. The most charming pieces play on Rowe’s own foibles. In one, he writes of having taken a soft job as a “caretaker”—in quotes—of a country estate with few clear lines of responsibility save, as he reveals, humoring the resident ghost. As the author notes on his website, being a TV host gave him great skills in “talking for long periods without saying anything of substance,” and some of his stories are more filler than compelling narrative. In others, though, he digs deeper, as when he writes of Jason Everman, a rock guitarist who walked away from two spectacularly successful bands (Nirvana and Soundgarden) in order to serve as a special forces operative: “If you thought that Pete Best blew his chance with the Beatles, consider this: the first band Jason bungled sold 30 million records in a single year.” Speaking of rock stars, Rowe does a good job with the oft-repeated matter of Charlie Manson’s brief career as a songwriter: “No one can say if having his song stolen by the Beach Boys pushed Charlie over the edge,” writes the author, but it can’t have helped.
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982130-85-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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