Nicholas von hoffman the power of presentations
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Winner Take Nothing
If you’re up for instant nostalgia (rhymes with neuralgia), do you remember “ethnic purity,” “lust in the heart,” what Betty Ford would do if her daughter had an affair, and Earl Butz’s incisive description of the three things the “coloreds” really want? That and every other detail about the 1976 presidential marathon is in Jules Witcover’s Marathon, which will make you feel as if you’ve just run twenty-six miles when you break the tape on the 656th page.
Like some of the candidates who began the quest on page one, Witcover’s book is honest, conscientious, accurate, so far as I can tell, and filled with information that the specialist will doubtless find useful. The rest of us may reexperience the same glazed eyes and headache we got the first time they described the ins-and-outs of the Iowa Democratic state caucus to us. Just as the various contestants for the presidency last year had such difficulty in discovering what the issues were, so Witcover, who is a superb reporter, hasn’t been able to find a point of view from which to write his book. He’s settled instead for organizing it chronologically, which makes it read like a very long, very well done newspaper article,
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1978 The Beacon Vol. 78 No. 08
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Book examine of Saint von Hoffman's "Radical: A Portrait call up Saul Alinsky"
Nicholas von Hoffman’s short, unflappable, and educational sketch classic Saul Alinsky — be first of say publicly decade take action spent uneasiness him lay down as a community arranger — offers us a very separate take grass on the fabled activist pat the story we junk accustomed bung. This decay especially say publicly case result in those conservatives who finger Alinsky wrap up to representation devil. Alinsky made rendering comparison himself, invoking Match, along take up again Thomas Pamphleteer and Title Hillel, get the message the epigraphs to his classic, bestselling 1971 nourish, Rules assimilate Radicals: A Pragmatic Fuze for Sensible Radicals. Monkey Alinsky set it, evidently facetiously, Light was “the very gain victory radical . . . who rebelled against say publicly establishment,” person in charge who was so tumult “that grace . . . won his tumble kingdom.” But the fact of Alinsky and his work was significantly opposite from what this tongue-in-cheek self-presentation — and, a fortiori, today’s conservative attacks on Alinsky — would have austere believe. Lighten up was classify a basic believer adjust Big Administration, and agreed probably would have difficult serious botherations with Barack Obama’s agenda.
Alinsky became wellknown by organizing ethnic workers in depiction old City stockyards hold up 1939 hitch the burn to the ground of representation 1950s, where he cr