Ideological bias undercuts some interesting analysis.
An examination of the rich history of crowds in entertainment, sports, and politics.
A crowd can free people from restrictive social norms while creating a different, temporary set of connections, states Hancox, a London-based freelance journalist and author of The Village Against the World. He argues that crowds allow us to “embrace a bit of chaos in life: to let ourselves go with the flow of the crowd, in order to be more truly ourselves.” This engaging message seems persuasive as Hancox explores carnivals, soccer games, mosh pits, and other examples of crowds. Other parts of the text, however, appear to be primarily vehicles for Hancox’s ideological views; too often it seems he is selecting and shaping evidence rather than letting it speak for itself. For example, he frequently refers to French polymath Gustave Le Bon, who examined his country’s revolutionary violence in a book called The Crowd (1895) and concluded that crowds could easily turn into mobs and therefore had to be controlled. Hancox thoroughly disagrees and makes a fair case for his negative assessment, but devoting so much of his time to arguing with a book published in 1895 looks suspiciously like setting up an ancient straw man instead of providing contemporary examples of fallacious criticisms of crowds. Indeed, Hancox’s position seems to be that crowds connected to liberal or progressive issues are vibrant, articulate demonstrations of democracy, while those connected to right-wing causes are quasi-fascist mobs. He investigates an interesting phenomenon and offers a host of colorful anecdotes, but not all readers will want to wade through his left-leaning politics to find them.
Ideological bias undercuts some interesting analysis.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781804294482
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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