A thoroughly researched, revelatory political history with abundant relevance for today.
The roots of right-wing politics on 1960s college campuses.
In her debut book, historian Shepherd draws on oral histories, archival sources, and interviews with 56 individuals to offer a deep examination of the reactionary movement on college campuses from 1967 to 1970. Students involved in organizations such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, and others benefited from financial support and mentorship from “anti-New Deal elders” seeking to foment “an astroturf mobilization against a so-called liberal establishment in higher education.” Shepherd investigates the many political, evangelical, libertarian, and “sizable and energetic” White supremacist clubs and organizations that reacted against peace and Black Power movements and that rallied in support of the Vietnam War. Some members of those groups became famous political figures, including Newt Gingrich, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke. All became powerful leaders in business, law, higher education, and conservative think tanks, where they continued to promote the views that they honed in their college years, driving American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right. The author clearly shows how “the current panic from the Right over student culture; curricula; and faculty hiring, tenure, and promotion is part of a longer historical pattern.” Although she reveals some in-fighting and ideological splits within student groups, their demographic was largely cohesive. In the 1960s, she reports, 95% of college students were White, middle class, and, except in women’s colleges, male. They presented themselves as “heteronormative white Christians,” proud to call themselves squares, as opposed to their long-haired hippie classmates. The groups disseminated their ideas through magazines and campus media; carefully curated speaker events; and, after campus protest demonstrations in 1968, calls for increased punishments for leftist student activists. Shepherd presents compelling evidence for the ways that these groups, although a minority on campus, have exerted long-lasting influence.
A thoroughly researched, revelatory political history with abundant relevance for today.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781469674490
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.
The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.
Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden—is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.
Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668051351
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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