Trumpite hagiography.
A paean to all things Trump.
“Whatever the final assessment of Trump’s second term, his achievement in recovering from ignominy and surviving the efforts of an entrenched establishment to destroy him will stand as the greatest political comeback in modern presidential history.” So exults Hanson, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a Trump booster from way back. Hanson is a classicist, which he signals by suggesting Trump is “a classically tragic figure”—though he doesn’t add that classically tragic figures are always so through their own hubris and arrogance, never by accident. Hanson also tosses in Latin tags—primus inter pares, damnatio memoriae, bellum omnium contra omnes, and such—for good measure. And he faults Democrats for ignoring Thucydides’ dark warnings about Corcyra (Corfu)—an author and place one suspects are unknown to Trump and his supporters as well. Along with glib references to Shakespeare and Nietzsche, though, Hanson belatedly allows that the MAGA base is made up of white men without college degrees, and so he recites an all-too-familiar litany of talking points and grievances. The only person to die on January 6, 2021, was MAGA acolyte Ashli Babbitt, shot “apparently for the probable misdemeanor of unlawfully entering the Capitol through a previously broken window.” There were “far more violent earlier attacks…such as the storming of the same Capitol on March 1, 1954, by armed Puerto Rican terrorists.” Liberal academicians think it their charge “to indoctrinate youth in progressive ideology, as part of a greater project to fundamentally alter the nature of the culture at large.” Trump insults individuals, not “the citizen poor, minorities, women, or any particular racial or religious group as a whole.” The Epstein files are “so-called.” And so on.
Trumpite hagiography.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781541607828
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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