Coloring the News
William McGowan
Encounter Books
You know the media has gone too left when liberal journalists like McGowan are writing books condemning anti-racism. Coloring the News proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we are being lied to; that today’s journalists are purposely not reporting events they see as too right-wing and skewing the stories they do report on to make the left look better. Of course, all this does is hurt the liberals and the visible minorities they are fighting to defend. American readers are turning away from mainstream news sources in droves because they no longer trust what they read. What started out as a noble intention to counteract white male oppression has spun desperately out of control. McGowan shows us the shoddy reporting of everything from gays in the military to immigration, and the evidence is shocking. What we thought was the newsroom of the freest country in the world sounds more like Stalinist Russia.
The good news is the book has been getting favorable reviews in The Washington Post and The New York Times (the two main news sources he’s criticizing), so there is hope that the pendulum may finally be headed back to the middle where it belongs.
GAVIN McINNES
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Ryan McGinley
Ryan McGinley
Index Books
You might know Ryan’s work from VICE’s controversial Polaroids or fashion shoots but this book, the first ever for Index Magazine, shows that he doesn’t need to show you coke being snorted off cocks to get noticed. It is 64 pages of slick production made up of Ryan’s best work from the past three years and it’s more than just a milestone in the history of New York photography. The book is a milestone in the history of New York.
CHRISTINA SPARX
Go to indexmagazine.com for more info. |
The Death of the West
Pat Buchanan
St. Martin’s Press
Remember when Pat was all about corporate America, even when corporate America was all about cheap labor and crushing the working class? Well, now he’s changed his mind and he’s for the working man. This book is not inaccurate. It talks about the death of Western culture due to a new wave of immigrants that refuse to assimilate. The problem with this book is the black cloud of pessimism that permeates every chapter. Every page speaks of doom and gloom for all cultures and seems determined to provide no solutions.
CHRISTI BRADNOX
White Riot – The Violent Story of Combat 18
Nick Lowles
Milo
Like the book Hezbollah by Hala Jabe, this book is all facts and no story. Instead of stringing together his research into some kind of running narrative like Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, Lowles bombards us with dates and names and places so hard we are forced to derive our own patterns just to stay awake.
Maybe Lowles was too chicken to bring it up but the pattern that permeates the whole history of this book is how fruitless their whole goal is. The most violent nazi skinhead / hooligan group in the world (Combat 18) is not going to start a race war, win it, and then create an all-white utopia where everyone lives as they did 100 years ago. Sorry. Why Lowles couldn’t have spun his facts around a simple truth like that is beyond me.
DARREN ALBERTY
Heeb: The New Jew Review
Winter 2002
I love this magazine. It let’s me say “heeb” without feeling dirty or fascist. And if they’re publishing swastikas in huge two-page spreads, everyone can publish swastikas. I wonder how well this New Jew Review will do, but I hope it hangs on because we need an irreverent, young, Jewish angle on pop culture and world politics. Have we had that yet?
JAMIE POLINSKY
The Elementary Particles
by Michel Houellebecq
Ever have one of those days when you suspect that Western culture has come to a pointless, barbaric conclusion? That’s every day for Michel Houellebecq. The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq’s vitriolic, idea-driven second novel, argues about the possibility of things like love, freedom, equality, etc... in a confident, summary, and at times off-hand manner. Houellebecq’s characters often conclude that the human condition is terminal; the hilarious and enlightening manners in which they arrive at that point redeem them — and this book — from a banal and bleak portrait of humanity. He relies on the split narrative of the two middle-age half-brothers, one an acclaimed scientist and the other, a failed academic, on their miserable quests for happiness and self-knowledge. Disorienting, but a powerful book, perhaps because the reader can watch many others suffer...and know why.
JOHNNY DWYER
