Customer Reviews

Promises Betrayed: Waking Up from the American Dream

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Bob Herbert, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times, collects some of his columns that range from 1995 to 2004 within "Promises Betrayed." The journalist gives a voice to the voiceless black citizens railroaded in Tulia, Texas, the wounded soldiers from the current war in Iraq, and the struggling working class. The writing is clear and often biting, especially when attacking the purveyors of injustice such as the racist cop in Tulia or some of President Bush's policies. For example, Herbert quotes George Akerlof, a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, in order to shed light on the current U.S. economy. Akerlof says, "the Bush fiscal policy is the worst policy in the last 200 years."

An annoying fact among this collection is that Herbert repeats himself often within a batch of related columns. For example, the same facts and tidbits are presented over and over again in the "Disgrace in Tulia" columns, which appear in sequential order, as originally published in newspaper print. With that nuisance aside, "Promises Betrayed" is still a worthy piece of reportage that brings to light clear cases of injustice. However, Herbert takes his reportage a step further and believes the cases presented are a reflection of an America decaying from within due to its eroding morals. He says, "We've been attacked from without, but the greater danger to the essence of America is within. There's a fire in the basement of the United States and we're behaving as if we cannot even smell the smoke."

Bohdan Kot

On Bob Herbert's worst day, he thinks ten times more clearly (and of course, writes exponentially better) than the two illiterates who felt moved to offer their pig-ignorant commentaries. I doubt that either of them bought the book. For people who value the truth and who know Bob Herbert's work, he is always a pleasure to read.

This book explores situations not covered by the mainstream media. An earlier reviewer said that some of the situations he writes about are not typical. Nevertheless they still exist and if you're intrested in reading them, this is a good buy. Poverty, corrupted corporations, to attacks on the middle-class; this book is a great introduction to some problems American faces in these modern times.

Promises Betrayed: Waking Up From The American Dream by Bob Herbert (Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times) is an in-depth analysis of the political struggle of citizens of minority groups and their confrontation with the power-based, vested interest realities of America which seek to maintain a discriminatory status quo. A study of the over-frequent application of the death penalty and the demagoguery of terrorism to control public opinion and electoral politics, Promises Betrayed acutely provides readers with a timeless and timely exposure of the truths in situations such as the fabrication of drug charges against several people on the racist behalf of a police officer in Tulia, Texas; an eleven-year-old girl's conviction of homicide despite any evidence supporting her confession as having been coerced, and so much more. Promises Betrayed is very strongly recommended for social activists, students of law and political science, as well non-specialist general readers seeking an understanding of the realities of the American political system and the endemic persecution of the innocent.

I'll try to start with something positive: the cover is pretty.

Beyond that, I'm not going to put more time into my review than the author spent "writing" this book which means I've got 5 minutes or less. This is a collection of newspaper columns. If the author wrote 10 columns on the same topic and included them all in the book, he didn't even bother to edit out the redundancies. Columns that span 20 pages in the book could have been reduced to 4 by eliminating the 80% of each column that he spent repeating the previous day's columns.
Couple that with columns that spend 10-20 pages arguing against a particular injustice, only to see in a 1 paragraph note at the end that the injustice was indeed righted, or that the column is 5 years out of date and no longer relevant with events that have transpired since, and one gets the sense of a writer with little respect for his readers and their time.
Done. In under 5 minutes.

Yeah, there is a lot wrong in America; the powerful do take advantage of the weak. I would have liked some perspective though rather than just a whining account.
Bob Herbert can do better than this. It sounds like a disgruntled Co-op board. Since the issues are much more serious an attempt at integrating the problem or recounting it with what should happen in America would be in order. The question begs, "Is America all in our minds?"

It's made to look on the cover like it is going to be about american troubles in general but again it turns out to be four-fifths just about african-americans. A whole section is devoted to most of Tulia, Mississippi's 10% African-American population recently getting arrested. While the author (himself African-american)is forever boringly blabbing about the problems of his racial countrymen he actually seemingly resorts to subtle (possibly sneaky) means to describe what he considers to be another problem for his racial countrymen. He describes a school in DC where the building is falling apart and never mentions that he is probably only writing about the school in failing condition because most or all of it's students and faculty are african-american! I think this particular school he wrote about is untypical of the rest of the USA as I know the mostly hispanic town of Lawrence, MA is getting a big, beautiful new high school. I think the school Herbert wrote was just an untypical example of bad faculty or maybe bad city management on a higher level.
Other ways his views of what he considers problems for (mostly) his racial countryman are that he is too one-sided. He mentions stuff like welfare cuts. Gosh Herbert did it ever occur to you that such cuts are so the people won't get on welfare and plan to stay their whole lives on it. We want to get people to become productive not lazy!

The worse thing about this book outside of it's disproportioned alotment to non-hispanic african-american problems--when such african-american only make up around 13% of the entire USA population according to the 2000 US Census--is his ridiculous handling of discussing the situation in US-occupied
Iraq. For starters he describes a peace movement that took place in early 2003 to say to get Saddam out of Iraq without war. That was impossible. The man had tons of money from his oil sales and other ventures, many arab allies,business contacts all over the world, and was immune to the effects of assassination as he provenly employed quite a few doubles of himself to make personal appearances. How could he have been thrown out without military force? He couldn't. The author personally goes for this nutty get-Saddam-out-without war bit in two areas of his book. Other problem he has in dealing with the US lead occupation of Iraq is that he is comparing it to Vietnam. Look Hebert and look good! The US employed over 8 million army, navy, air force and marine personnel in the Vietnam War and that was with a draft! There is no draft in the US-lead Iraqi occupation. We've employed less than half a million men and women in this war so far and our death count is under 1800 the death count in the VietNam conflict was above 58,000! There is no analogy!

In the last area of his book he starts writing about only so many people knowing evolution. What on earth that had to do with anything else in this book I don't know!