Intriguing, but the author lacks the tact needed to sway the masses.
Conservative economist DiLorenzo (How Capitalism Saved America, 2004) continues his diatribe about the causes of the Civil War that he began in The Real Lincoln (not reviewed).
Indeed, the author repeats many of the arguments made in his previous book, published in 2002. His contention that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist whose primary motivation for fighting the Civil War was a desire to maintain a system of tariffs that greatly benefited northern states has enough evidence behind it to at least be compelling. But his unrelenting vitriol toward an American icon, perhaps the foremost American icon, will undoubtedly rankle many and may position him as a publicity-hungry academic peddling controversy. DiLorenzo (Economics/Loyola Coll.) contends that a “Lincoln cult” seeks to perpetuate his image as a near-perfect president for the purpose of promoting big government, weakening states’ rights and justifying the controversial actions of later chief executives. As an example, the author points to neo-conservative Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment (2004), which tried to rationalize FDR’s treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, an act that mirrored Lincoln’s imprisonment of northerners who protested his use of force to keep the South in the Union. Historians from the left and the right are members of the Lincoln cult, DiLorenzo states, seeking to use some facet of his legacy to bolster their own agendas. The author’s arguments that the South had a legal right to secede and the Founding Fathers themselves would have supported that choice are convincing, as is his assertion that the war erupted from economic issues, not slavery. However, his unceasing attacks on Lincoln put readers on the defensive, and when he obsessively hounds a single Lincoln scholar throughout an entire chapter, he seems to be pursuing an academic vendetta rather than any greater understanding.
Intriguing, but the author lacks the tact needed to sway the masses.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33841-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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