Short on juicy secrets, long on tedium.
New Yorker staff writer Robbins (co-author, Quarterlife Crisis, not reviewed) stretches a few secrets of the Yale secret society into a dreary extended narrative.
Herself a Yale grad and member of another such club (unnamed), the author begins with a dull history of the university and its hidden organizations. In 1832, William Russell returned to New Haven after study in Germany bearing the fundamentals of a secret society that used a death's head as its logo. The Order of Skull and Bones became the school's most prestigious club and retains that aura today; the 15 men and (since 1991) women inducted each year join a long list of distinguished Americans. Robbins describes the organization’s bonding methods. A private building, called a tomb, provides a safe haven for members. (An art restorer who repaired food-splattered paintings reports that it looks like most frat houses but with thicker walls and more morbid furnishings.) Skull and Bones pins with the number “322” are worn by members; 1832 was the year of origin, and “2” refers to Yale’s branch being the second one after the Germans’. Skull and Bones time is five minutes ahead of the rest of the world, but 1,802 years behind; current documents are dated D200. Only seniors join; each year's group chooses the next 15. Influenced by Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy, the initiation is led by a senior acting as Uncle Toby. Intense personal discussions and boodleball (soccer played in the large dining room) create lifelong bonds among the 15 and with their predecessors, known as Patriarchs. A month after his inauguration, George Bush senior invited the surviving Bonesmen of his year to a White House reunion. At least 58 members donated money to the presidential campaign of Bush junior (Bones 1968). Humorless and emotionally bland throughout, Robbins's prose sucks the vitality out of the story: privileged college students must be having more fun than we see here.
Short on juicy secrets, long on tedium.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-72091-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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