PositiveThe Times (UK)The Paynes, fortified by hundreds of interviews with family and associates, have thrown some fresh light on the legend ... The Paynes do not spare us the details of Malcom’s own villainy ... His time in jail is told less as a religious epiphany and more as an education in verbal dexterity as a survival tool. They are less forthcoming on his violence to women, white and black, or his barely suppressed antisemitism and homophobia.
Anne Applebaum
PositiveThe Times (UK)Some will sympathise with [Applebaum\'s] dismay at these former comrades’ abandonment of political pluralism, and her anger at their toleration of state-sanctioned antisemitism. Others will instead see only the bewilderment of an entitled liberal elite that has suddenly discovered that it can no longer take its own ascendancy for granted ... [Applebaum] deploys the roles of both historian and hostess to impressive effect. She does not spare her own conservative tribe ... the most intriguing narrative here is of the emerging Leninism of the right in Europe and America ... The fact that no one in this group seems to understand why they keep losing elections to populists, left and right, is in itself revealing. However, it would be a mistake to see this book simply as a socialite’s plea for moderation. Nothing so anodyne. Twilight of Democracy is, if anything, a rather penetrating work of ethnography, a novel study of the intellectual tribe to which the author belongs.
Ibram X. Kendi
PanThe Times (UK)In an often engaging amble through three decades, he touches on themes that do need airing ... Less impressively, he shares the now obligatory \'woke\' self-flagellation of discovering his own homophobia and color snobbery ... But it is in his attempt to apply [Critical Race Theory] to modern America where Kendi comes seriously unstuck ... Kendi can organize his data points, for sure; but he provides no way of deciding whether his ideas are consistent with fact ... Aside from depriving black Americans of any agency in their own lives, none of this explains today’s America ... His solutions—basically, greater self-awareness all round—position politics as a subsidiary branch of social psychology. And his assertion that capitalism cannot exist without racism and vice versa is absurd ... he seems like a prophet warning us of a future we’ve already passed through. Without more rigorous tools of analysis, the storytelling is likely to end up promoting the political outcome he would most hate: more racial division, and more Trump.
