by Tricia Erickson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2011
A febrile hit job, more polemical than analytical.
A spirited critique of Mormonism as a religion and Mitt Romney as a political leader.
Debut author Erickson argues that Mitt Romney is a species of religiously directed Manchurian candidate, a brainwashed dupe slavishly beholden to the Mormon church’s elders. The author splits her analysis into a critique of Mormonism as a religion and an exposé of the church’s and Romney’s nefarious political commitments. The first part begins with a brief history of the Mormon church aimed at revealing both its sordid past and unpalatable doctrinal commitments, including the racist denigration of both blacks and Jews. The author’s principal criticism of the church is its inquisitional intolerance. It demands the utter subjugation of its members and brooks no dissent. And since Romney is utterly devoted to the Mormon faith, his election to president, she believes, is tantamount to an election of his church superiors: “Maybe not willingly my friend, but if you elect Mitt Romney as president of this nation, you will likely be following the prophet he follows because the decisions Mitt Romney will make for this country, in all likelihood, will be directly based upon the prophet and the teachings of his faith.” Erickson attacks Romney exhaustively, assessing his financial dealings, his political campaigns, his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, and the extent to which he remains faithful to professed conservative principles. She writes from the perspective of a conservative in favor of limited government and against both abortion and government-run health care. Erickson grew up within the Mormon faith, and her knowledge of its history and guiding beliefs is impressively comprehensive. Her prose, however, is breathlessly strident—she calls Romney a “hollow shell of a man”—and abounds with conspiratorial paranoia and immoderate hyperbole. Most importantly, though, her arguments are largely unconvincing. Many of the criticisms she makes of the Mormon church regarding its checkered past, theological inconsistency, doctrinal dogmatism, and institutional dysfunction could just as legitimately be made of the Catholic Church, which she seems to favor. And her argument that Romney is insufficiently pro-life seems incompatible with her fear that he’s blindly devoted to his faith.
A febrile hit job, more polemical than analytical.Pub Date: June 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4497-1200-6
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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