An eye-opening look at the small but eminently dangerous radical right-wing fringe out there in the shadows.
An FBI agent recounts his years infiltrating white supremacist groups.
Being an undercover agent, writes Payne, isn’t much like the Hollywood depiction, though there’s truth in the method-actor part of the gig: the need to become someone else. The agent/actor is out there mostly alone, without day-to-day support. “Undercover work,” he writes, “can get pretty lonely at times. You never really get used to it.” Joining the FBI after working as a vice and narcotics investigator for a South Carolina county sheriff, Payne, brawny and tough, was put to work infiltrating biker groups in the Northeast, busting corrupt cops caught up in the drug trade and the like before going deep undercover to track down violent supremacists. This wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan, Payne writes, who are “basically your grandpa’s white supremacists,” but groups such as the Base, modeled after Al Qaeda (which means “the base” in Arabic), whose members are committed to the violent overthrow of the government. Largely disaffected rural people who are lightly educated and heavily armed, they call themselves “accelerationists,” buying into the theory that once the U.S. is overrun by lawless immigrants and the feckless Democrats do nothing about it, “society will decline, and the country will burn,” and the (white) nation will clamor for deliverance. Dubbed “the Hillbilly Donnie Brasco” and trained by the real “Brasco” himself (Joe Pistone), Payne runs with some ugly types to do his job—for one, a woman who takes him on to do home invasions and tells him, “If you need someone tortured, I like torture.” The work, he writes in his tough-as-nails account, became even more pressing after the deadly 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Now retired, he intimates that there’s plenty more to be done to curb supremacist radicalism, now in the ascendant.
An eye-opening look at the small but eminently dangerous radical right-wing fringe out there in the shadows.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781668032909
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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