PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksSharlet’s description resonates more with 19th-century anthropological ethnography than it does with anything from the 21st century ... Reading The Undertow, one comes away wondering if Sharlet himself has fallen under the charismatic sway of his subject ... Sharlet’s reckoning with the events of that day remains unparalleled, but it also reminds us that we are still trying to understand the motivations of the same delusional inhabitants of the public square ... Projection is a powerful force; if not careful, Sharlet and others will metastasize an otherwise provincial development into an international global menace.
Thomas Frank
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksThere’s no doubting Frank’s research ... but I wonder...to what extent Frank overly romanticizes his historical subjects ... It may be tempting to read a particular sociocultural consciousness into the past when it comes to the 1890s’ \'Pops\'—overly familiar shorthand for populists Frank uses throughout the book—but it ultimately makes for a less convincing argument overall ... What is striking about Frank’s historical and social analyses is that they virtually ignore religious social actors, who were irrefutably significant players at various points in time in the longer story of American populism ... The role of media in cultivating either populist and/or fascist sentiment in Frank’s story goes largely undertheorized. And as a result, we lose a sense of how individuals in the past mobilized one or the other and to what end: democratic or otherwise ... In short, Frank succumbs to the very ideology he resents: the searing of uncouth men.
Jeff Sharlet
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksSharlet’s subjects of investigation certainly include things and the people who make them, but those very people are often times the ones giving flesh to the incarnate word through their stories ... This Brilliant Darkness illustrates how human beings make sense of their worlds through the divine and its various presences and absences ... This is less a book of Sharlet’s reflections on the world \'out there,\' and more of a living record of how Sharlet and his readers are made and remade through the stories consumed about one another, with one another, if only for a moment’s time. In many ways, Sharlet’s subject is the human heart itself and its capacity to expand beyond the confines of the physical body: human, nation-state, or otherwise. It is also about the forces and experiences that call upon the human heart to open itself up to the stranger and under what conditions ... Both Sharlet’s extended writings and his short meditations illuminate these sensations because the work of collecting them is in itself an act of sensation ... Sharlet invites us to consider what brilliant darkness arrests our own attention in both individual and collective terms in calamitous times.
Kevin M Kruse
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"... Kruse and Zelizer do an admirable job of creating a narrative out of the chaotic events of the recent past according to the themes of crisis, consolidation, and polarization ... The book is most valuable, however, in its assessment of conservative mobilization since the 1970s and the ways in which such \'narrowcasting\' has deployed various forms of media in stoking the flames of cultural division as a form of electoral politics. In fact, Kruse and Zelizer could have foregrounded the culture wars even more in their analyses instead of assuming their existence as part of the socio-political backdrop of the period ... Thanks to Kruse and Zelizer, we now know how and why [Steve Bannon\'s tactics] worked from within our divided present, an age that pits citizens against one another seemingly in a form of all-out war.\
