Review by Choice Review
Belew (Univ. of Chicago) argues that pro-war, right-wing Americans attributed the loss of the war in Vietnam to left-liberal opposition on the home front and aligned themselves with neo-Nazi and KKK elements to avenge the betrayal of the military's mission. By the early 1980s, she writes, that coalition--with a misogynist and racist "white power" movement at its core--had congealed into paramilitary militias. The militias' revanchist leaders laid blame for the defeat in Vietnam at the foot of the Capitol steps, preaching that government power had been seized by ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government. The militias made war on ZOG throughout the 1980s and 1990s, confronting government forces in violent clashes at Ruby Ridge, ID, and Waco, TX, before Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. Belew's work supports the idea that the defeat in Vietnam festers in American culture into the 21st century, but other writers have made that case more effectively; her hypothesis that the ideology of white supremacy also "came home" from Vietnam is less supportable. Large sections of the book reproduce newspaper accounts of militia clashes with federal authorities, adding little to what scholars already know. Summing Up: Recommended. Public libraries. --Jerry Lembcke, emeritus, College of the Holy Cross
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
LAKE SUCCESS, by Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $18.) Overwhelmed by his young son's autism diagnosis and dodging a subpoena from the S.E.C., this book's antihero leaves behind a job at a Manhattan hedge fund and hops on a Greyhound bus, hoping to reconnect with an ex-girlfriend teaching Holocaust studies in El Paso. Shteyngart's frantic humor keeps the story afloat and gleefully satirizes the upper class. SOMETHING WONDERFUL: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, by Todd S. Purdum. (Picador, $20.) This book is an authoritative portrait of the duo behind some of our best-loved musicals: "Oklahoma!," "South Pacific," "The King and I" and more. For all their masterpieces, the pair was often seen as stodgy and middlebrow. Purdum, a writer for Vanity Fair, shows how that wasn't at all the case. EARLY WORK, by Andrew Martin. (Picador, $17.) An aimless, struggling young writer is undone by a love affair, but this intelligent debut novel is about more than the calamity of romance: Martin stuffs his narrative with a cast of compelling characters, many of them authors, as they negotiate their desires. Our reviewer, Molly Young, praised the book, calling it "a tidy and perfectly ornamented novel with no unsanded corners or unglossed surfaces." BRING THE WAR HOME: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, by Kathleen Belew. (Harvard University, $16.95.) Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago, traces the beginning of the radical right in America to the Vietnam War. The book makes the argument that the white power movement led to the deadly Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which Belew sees as a reaction to the war. While much of the book draws on events from the 1970s and 1980s, it has particular resonance today. ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD: Stories, by Anjali Sachdeva. (Spiegel & Grau, $17.) In tales that leap across the globe, characters struggle to reconcile their hopes and dreams with their fates. Our reviewer, Julie Orringer, praised the collection, writing, "The brilliance of these stories - beyond the cool, precise artistry of their prose - is their embrace of both the known and the unknown, in a combination that feels truly original." NO ONE TELLS YOU THIS: A Memoir, by Glynnis MacNicol. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) Childless, single and in her 40s, MacNicol had a grim thought - that she had officially become "the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman's life worth living." Her smart memoir celebrates women who forge their own paths, ignoring the cultural scripts they've been handed.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 14, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, delivers an engrossing and comprehensive history of the white power movement in America, highlighting its racism, antigovernment hostility, and terrorist tactics. This impressively researched work looks into, first, the Vietnam War's influence on the movement's earliest leaders, such as Vietnam veteran Louis Beam, who equated the Vietnam War with American decline and wanted to reclaim a time before civil rights, legal abortion, birth control, immigration of nonwhites, and interracial marriage. Then, Belew investigates the movement's evolution: its call for "leaderless resistance" and war against the government in the 1980s; the growth of its militia phase that led to the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, the Branch Davidians in Waco, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and its shift to online platforms in the late 1990s. She also studies the movement's paramilitary training camps, the role of women in the movement, its push to respond in kind to the militarization of police departments, and the difficulties of prosecuting its leaders-due, in part, to its strategy of decentralization and the groundswell of support for militias in the mid-1990s. Belew presents a convincing case that white power rhetoric and activism continue to influence mainstream U.S. politics. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Belew (history, Univ. of Chicago) traces late 20th-century white power violence from the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City bombing. As white soldiers returned to the United States after tours in Vietnam, some "never stopped fighting" the racialized "other." This study uses contemporary media coverage, government records, and the literature of white power activists to chart how the pain and rage of some white soldiers was transmuted into violence against people of color and revolutionary antistate violence. The first part documents how Vietnam served to unify and militarize disparate white power groups during the 1970s and 1980s; Part 2 looks at how the rhetoric of patriotism shifted in the mid-1980s to one of revolution; while Part 3 considers how government violence at Ruby Ridge, ID, (1992) and Waco, TX, (1993) strengthened white power narratives of martyrdom while mainstream narratives around the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing occluded the white power network that made Timothy McVeigh's action possible. Of particular note is Belew's chapter on the understudied topic of white women's role in the movement. VERDICT This necessary work reminds readers that white violence-on behalf of, and against, the state-has a long and deep history.-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Belew (History/Univ. of Chicago) pieces together evidence from primary and secondary sources to argue that the racist, anti-government, heavily armed white power movement is not what it seems.As the author shows, many government agencies, law enforcers, and individual citizens have fallen for the myth that the lethal domestic terrorism carried out in the name of white supremacists is the doing of angry lone wolves. On the contrary, she writes, the movement is well-organized and thus more dangerous than previously understood. Belew places these types of individuals under the umbrella of sometimes-violent white power, a group that includes neo-Nazis, radical tax resisters, self-proclaimed Klansmen, members of local militias, separatists who oppose racial integration, and believers in white theologies such as Christian Identity. Although violent white supremacists have never been absent in American history, the author pegs the contemporary movement as growing from the discontent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, a war that not so incidentally trained young men filled with racial hatred how to kill efficiently, not only with rifles, but also with powerful explosives. Before the war, white supremacists believed they were supporting governmental authority via vigilante justice, meant to marginalize undesirables. But the current white power movement members would prefer to overthrow governments, even at the cost of lives taken. A key concept in understanding the overall movement, writes Belew, is the concept of "leaderless resistance," as exemplified by Timothy McVeigh's insistence that he acted almost entirely alone in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing despite evidence that he considered himself a soldier in a coordinated cell-style underground. The near invisibility of the movement leaders has led directly to the proliferation of the public's belief in the phenomenon of lone wolves, which helps protect the movement from a coordinated takedown.Belew's impressive research effectively supports her hypothesis. A good launching point for even further intensive study. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
