A graceful meditation, sometimes elegiac in tone, on the last days of the Old Mountain West and its replacement with a new myth. ``The interior West is no longer a faraway land,'' writes Kittredge (Hole in the Sky, 1992, etc.). ``Our great emptiness is filling with people, and we are experiencing a time of profound transition, which can be thought of as a second colonization.'' In that new colonization, fueled by well-heeled transients who have seen Legends of the Fall and A River Runs Through It one time too many, newcomers arrive in places like Choteau, Mont., and Moab, Utah, with money to burn, displacing the locals. ``People want to enclose our lives in theirs, as decor,'' Kittredge observes, and you can feel the resentment hanging in the clear blue western air. All the while, he says pointedly, the Native Americans smile and say, ``Now it's happening to you.'' The resentments, says Kittredge, are yielding events like the Ruby Ridge shootout and the Oklahoma City bombings. To stem them, he imagines a different kind of western myth: not of the place of Shane-like loners and a self-styled aristocracy that sees the land as a place to conquer- -men, Kittredge writes, like his own father, who carved out a farm from a pocket of southeast Oregon bottomland. In their stead, he argues, must come westerners who love the land ``because the story of your life has become part of the story of that place.'' Kittredge populates his pages with fellow dreamers, mostly writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Hugo, and even the airiest of his reveries touch ground in precise, epigrammatic observations: ``We are, most of us, ethnologists in our own house,'' he writes, ``working to locate ourselves amid the clutter.'' Longtime westerners—this book's real audience—will find many points to argue with in Kittredge's striking pages.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56279-078-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
A timely contribution to the discussion of a crucial issue.
A history of the right to vote in America.
Since the nation’s founding, many Americans have been uneasy about democracy. Law and policy expert Waldman (The Second Amendment: A Biography, 2014, etc.), president of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, offers a compelling—and disheartening—history of voting in America, from provisions of the Constitution to current debates about voting rights and campaign financing. In the Colonies, only white male property holders could vote and did so in public, by voice. With bribery and intimidation rampant, few made the effort. After the Revolution, many states eliminated property requirements so that men over 21 who had served in the militia could vote. But leaving voting rules to the states disturbed some lawmakers, inciting a clash between those who wanted to restrict voting and those “who sought greater democracy.” That clash fueled future debates about allowing freed slaves, immigrants, and, eventually, women to vote. In 1878, one leading intellectual railed against universal suffrage, fearing rule by “an ignorant proletariat and a half-taught plutocracy.” Voting corruption persisted in the 19th century, when adoption of the secret ballot “made it easier to stuff the ballot box” by adding “as many new votes as proved necessary.” Southern states enacted disenfranchising measures, undermining the 15th Amendment. Waldman traces the campaign for women’s suffrage; the Supreme Court’s dismal record on voting issues (including Citizens United); and the contentious fight to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which “became a touchstone of consensus between Democrats and Republicans” and was reauthorized four times before the Supreme Court “eviscerated it in 2013.” Despite increased access to voting, over the years, turnout has fallen precipitously, and “entrenched groups, fearing change, have…tried to reduce the opportunity for political participation and power.” Waldman urges citizens to find a way to celebrate democracy and reinvigorate political engagement for all.
A timely contribution to the discussion of a crucial issue.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1648-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior 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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