Book Review: Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen by Roderick P. Hart
Roderick P. Hart’s book was written in a time noisy with the sounds and echoes of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. The political world is quieter now. Former President Trump can hardly be heard from his Florida base. He has not disappeared, and his continuing influence on the Republican Party and on the practice of US politics is evidenced by the nervous cotillion being performed around him. Witness Senator Mitch McConnell who, in rapid succession, voted to acquit Trump in the second impeachment trial, made a speech excoriating Trump for his role in prompting the January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and only days later affirmed that he would ‘absolutely’ support Trump’s return to the White House should the Donald gain the GOP nomination in 2024.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Laughing to Keep from Dying by Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Laughing to Keep From Dying centres its discussion on the ways satire enables a social commentary which illustrates the power of Black selfhood; satire becomes a new form of social justice. (2) The texts discussed in this book ‘reveal critical anxieties about race and critique the irrationality of racialization’. (3) This critique draws attention to the mistreatment of African Americans and initiates a discourse about racial inequality in America.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Age of Hiroshima edited by Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry
The essays chosen for The Age of Hiroshima are an attempt by its editors to, in their words, ‘unsettle’ the legacy and understanding of the bombing of Hiroshima, an act that ushered in the nuclear age. (2) This collection explores the nuclear age from a global perspective, rather than simply through the viewpoint of the Cold War.
Continue ReadingBook Review: What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era By Carlos Lozada
Carlos Lozada. What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020). pp. 272. £20. Even before Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, numerous books began to appear that attempted to diagnose the Trump phenomenon and situate it in relation to American politics and culture. Throughout Trump’s disastrous term as president, Trump-themed books were released at a relentless pace, and even more are sure to follow in the coming years now that he has been voted out of office. While many of these books are compelling and illuminating, the weakest ones have been those that have attempted to boil Trump’s dismaying victory down to some simple monocausal answer. With these factors in mind, I was intrigued by Carlos Lozada’s book What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020), which provides an overview of some 150 recent books […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Sum of Our Dreams by Louis Masur
Louis P. Masur’s three-hundred-something page history of the United States is positioned as an introductory text, ‘a foundation of knowledge’ (xvii). All the familiar faces put in an appearance, from John Smith to Frederick Douglass; Horatio Alger to Martin Luther King Jr. Masur quotes Benjamin Franklin on death and taxes, Neil Armstrong on small steps and great leaps, and Gordon Gekko on the goodness of greed. He lingers on the Founding Fathers, on Lincoln, on the two Roosevelts, on Nixon, on Trump. In the four hundred and thirty years this book covers, the only women who receive more than passing mention are Harriet Beecher Stowe and Hilary Rodham Clinton.
Continue ReadingBook Review: We Are An African People by Russell Rickford
In We are an African People, historian Russell Rickford attempts and succeeds to define an era within African American culture where new models of pedagogy and identity were being explored by African Americans. Rickford researches the establishment and ultimate redundancy of Pan African, Afrocentric schools within the USA during the period post-Civil Rights era; where the ‘freedoms’ of African Americans were celebrated, and a ‘post racial’ ideology set. There were many, within the African American community, grappling with their racial identity and equality in a system that was underwritten by the White majority.
Continue ReadingBook Review and Author Interview: The Centenal Cycle Trilogy by Malka Older
A pivotal election has the international public on edge. As rivaling political forces vie for political power, digital communication media becomes the weapon of choice in a fierce ideological battle. Like an autoimmune disorder, the free flow of information meant to protect democracy threatens to destroy it from the inside, with conspiracies real and imagined putting the social fabric to a dramatic stress test.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto
Steven Belletto’s impeccably well-researched literary history, The Beats, traces the Beat Generation’s interrelationship between creativity, a writer’s life and literary connections, and literary production. The synergies, networks, and affiliations Belletto highlights are invaluable, and prove his point that the ‘richest way to appreciate individual Beat texts is in relation to one another.’ (xi)
Continue ReadingBook Review: Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood by Rebecca Brückmann
The stereotypical idea of the southern lady, in ‘her silent influence, in her eternal vigil’, was belied by photographs of white women who protested school desegregation by screaming at young Black children.[i] Rebecca Brückmann’s study, Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation, is a significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship that shows that white southern women were neither passive nor powerless in their support of segregation.
Continue ReadingBook Review: An Intimate Economy by Alexandra J. Finley
Alexandra J. Finley’s new book, An Intimate Economy, examines the vital role that women played in the US economy in the mid-nineteenth century, focusing primarily on enslaved and formerly enslaved African American women. The majority of that examination is done through the personal histories of African American women who were able to use their economic positions, both whilst enslaved and in freedom, to gain some form of power and independence.
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