Sciolino incorporates numerous interviews in order to preserve a shrewd, journalistic distance in this illuminating book.
An American journalist in Paris offers a serious, skeptical study of France’s quintessential “soft power.”
The art of getting results by attraction rather than coercion is a long specialty of the French, especially in terms of politics, foreign policy, language, manners, food, culture and style. New York Times Paris correspondent Sciolino (Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, 2000, etc.) presents some of the prevailing, socially accepted uses of opération séduction (“charm offensive”) that both bemuse her sense of American pragmatism and arouse her incredulity. Men of a certain age still tender the baisemain to married women (Hillary Clinton got one from President Sarkozy), women learn from the cradle to dress provocatively (and then welcome admiring remarks from strangers) and married people routinely take lovers as part of keeping “in good health,” while France’s national symbol is a sexy, barefoot commoner named Marianne whose bodice falls half undone. French politicians cannot get elected if they can’t demonstrate a vigorous capability: Case in point, when Sarkozy’s wife of many years left him for another man, he married supermodel Carla Bruni in a hurry and found his approval ratings soar. French shamelessness extends to politicians such as former presidents Mitterand, Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac, for whom the political office was another form of seduction. French professional women do not seem to be concerned that insistent male attention would be called harassment in the United States. Ultimately, Sciolino grates at the real problem unsettling the French—i.e., their fear of declinism, or decline. Their traditional arts of seduction—slow food, lace, finely crafted luxury items, etc.—are being threatened by globalization, eliciting a heavy sense of nostalgia for the era when beauty and pleasure reigned. Moreover, French leaders like Sarkozy still embrace a “profound unity of our culture,” even though about 10 percent of France’s population is “of Arab and African origin or descent,” underscoring deep fissures in France’s sense of its own national identity.
Sciolino incorporates numerous interviews in order to preserve a shrewd, journalistic distance in this illuminating book.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9115-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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