Praise and Criticism
Neil Postman, in the preface to Conscientious Objections, describes Baker as "...like some fourth century citizen of Rome who is amused and intrigued by the Empire's collapse but who still cares enough to mock the stupidities that are hastening its end. He is, in my opinion, a precious national resource, and as long as he does not get his own television show, America will remain stronger than Russia." (1991, xii)
Noam Chomsky accused Baker of "genocide denial with a vengeance" after the latter praised the work of Edmund Morgan, who wrote: "In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants." Chomsky notes that Morgan's figure of one million is "off by many tens of millions", meaning he and Baker are denying the genocide of many millions of indigenous Americans.
Read more about this topic: Russell Baker
Famous quotes containing the words praise and/or criticism:
“I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey’s end
With Landor and with Donne.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)