Identity is bunk. What’s in your wallet?
A radical critique of the nation’s penchant for highlighting diversity and ignoring financial inequality.
Michaels (English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; The Shape of the Signifier, 2004) says Americans would rather talk about racial, ethnic and gender differences than focus on the only difference that matters—some people are rich (and getting richer) and the rest are not. For years, as the gap between the rich and the poor has widened, “we’ve been urged to respect people’s identities—as if the problem of poverty would be solved if we just appreciated the poor,” he writes. In fact, the poor are not interested in diversity; they want to stop being poor, he says, noting there will never be a National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the DC Mall. Drawing examples from current events, novels and popular culture, Michaels describes a national near-fetish with cultural diversity that manifests itself in everything from university enrollments to corporate hiring. Used to organizing the world racially, Americans keep doing it, finding it easier to fight racism rather than admit to class differences. The author excoriates both left and right, arguing that diversity satisfies both sides in the culture wars, permitting them to believe that “the fundamental problems of American society have nothing to do with capitalism.” His challenge to the nation’s dominant thinking can be unsettling, and he will provoke many with assertions minimizing the impact of discrimination in American life: He says, for example, that black intellectuals are simply nostalgic for the black culture that Jim Crow helped create, and that anti-Semitism has never been as significant as Negrophobia. By basking constantly in identity, Americans are able to avoid seeing and acting on class inequalities. Thus, says the author, some critics mistakenly chose to see President Bush as anti-black—not anti-poor—in his handling of Hurricane Katrina, when in fact not many rich black people were left behind in New Orleans.
Identity is bunk. What’s in your wallet?Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7841-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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