Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.
A riveting account of the human consequences of the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Journalist Neus, who field-produced the rally for Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, uses the voices of counterprotesters, local clergy, elected officials, University of Virginia students, and journalists to lay bare the collective anxieties engendered by “alt-right” protesters. The result is a gripping narrative of psychological and physical damage, laid out vividly by Neus via the voices of those on the ground. On May 13, according to the Heaphy report, White nationalists in KKK regalia “formed into ranks…in front of the statue of Robert E. Lee and chanted ‘blood and soil,’ ‘you will not replace us,’ and ‘Russia is our friend.’ ” In July, notes the UVA dean of students, “the flyers for the Unite the Right rally had started showing up and they had very neo-Nazi imagery, a fascist eagle.” According to the chaplain at a local hospital, medical professionals “were preparing for mass casualties.” On the night of Aug. 11, White supremacists marched to campus, and a UVA professor “saw 150, 200 neo-Nazis with torches….The students were in a circle, locked arms around the [Thomas Jefferson] statue.” The next night, noted a student, “a group of white supremacists, some with their hands taped like boxers, punched, kicked, and choked people who tried to block their path, leaving them bloody on the pavement.” Amid the turmoil, a counterprotestor and former member of Congress recalls, “The shocking thing…was that [the fighting] went on for like three hours and the police still hadn’t moved in.” When the police finally did arrive, they pushed the marchers into a crowd of counterprotestors. A local clergyman remembers: “What we had for hours after that were bands of Nazis roaming through downtown.” Another: “There was blood everywhere.”
Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780807011928
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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