From Publishers Weekly
In four essays followed by short but detailed profiles of more than 35 extremist groups on the left and right, the authors survey the history of extremism in America. Extremism, they argue in bland but clear prose, is less a matter of ideology than an ideological style consisting of such traits as the advocacy of double standards and a Manichaean world view. They survey the motivations of extremists before launching into their profiles, which should prove a useful resource for scholars and students. However, a few of the entries, such as the one on the Communist Party USA, are outdated, and the authors should have better delineated which groups continue to be active, since some of those listed are not. An intriguing appendix catalogues fabricated documents and fake quotes; several are attributed to Lenin. George ( They Never Said It ) is professor of political science at the University of Central Oklahoma; Wilcox assembled a collection of extremist literature now housed at the University of Kansas.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This survey of American extremism, right and left, cries out for editing. The authors have seemingly thrown in all the material that was at hand, some useful and much tangential and distracting. Meaningful details and research are intermingled higgledy-piggledy with feeble history, banal analysis, and outright sloppiness, and the result is a shapeless mass of information. The bulk of the book is a series of descriptions of specific extremist groups, and its selling point would be that it includes both ends of the spectrum. But the book's digressions and scattershot quality undermine its value both as reference work and as reading material. Libraries would do better with books treating either end of the spectrum more systematically--for instance, Mari Jo Buhle and others' Encyclopedia of the American Left ( LJ 6/15/90) and the Anti-Defamation League's Extremism on the Right: A Handbook (A.D.L., 1988).
- Timothy Christenfeld, Columbia Univ.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Timothy Christenfeld, Columbia Univ.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
