This fourth book by Dyson (Between God and Gangsta Rap, 1995, etc.) is a collection of interlocking essays pondering the ongoing dilemmas of race, class, and gender in the African-American community. ``Why another book on race?'' Dyson asks at the outset. He answers, ``Because we haven't learned our lessons.'' The seven chapters of his latest offering trace a complex line through the race/gender/class nexus, from the O.J. Simpson trial through the Million Man March, with thoughtful considerations of the nature of black male leadership, the need for a black Christian theology of sexuality, the role of black public intellectuals, and the intergenerational split within black America. At the heart of the book is the useful distinction that Dyson charts between race as context, as subtext, and as pretext. In practical terms, most effectively in his essay on male leadership, this trilogy is expressed as the difference between Colin Powell as one whose appeal is based on transcending race, Louis Farrakhan as one who has translated race, and Jesse Jackson as a leader who has transformed race. This last model is the one that Dyson forcefully valorizes, a leadership style that acknowledges the powerful wrongs of white supremacy but seeks to make common cause with others oppressed by sexism, homophobia, class and economic divisions. Dyson is himself a Baptist minister, and he shares the traditionalist framework that unites all three of his exemplars of black male leadership, but as his powerful chapter on sexuality and the black church indicates, he is not locked into a reactionary vision of gender and sexuality. On the downside, Dyson occasionally engages in too much on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand analysis; what is clearly an honest search for the truth occasionally reads like the temporizing of a politician seeking to appease all the voters. Despite its occasional shortcomings, a thoughtful and balanced addition to a national debate all too often marked by outraged polemic. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-201-91186-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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