Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
Wide-ranging ... An ambitious book ... As a series of capsule histories of 21st-century right-wing movements, the book is serviceable ... He generally writes in a lucid, ambling style that is engaging enough page by page ... Kendi has long had a tendency to distill big ideas into simple categories ... Sometimes sacrifices clarity for the sake of metaphor and clunky wordplay ... A book that is simultaneously too pessimistic, about the inexorable appeal of right-wing rhetoric, and too naïve, about the effort required to beat them back.
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Harrowing ... It’s hard to come away from Chain of Ideas without a firm conviction that the most violently disturbed people in the world are being sicced on us by elected leaders ... Other elements of his scholarship are more disputable.
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While much of what Kendi observes has been said before, his gift for connecting the dots and pointing out common tactics and talking points in disparate places is eye-opening and sobering.
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