An astute, engrossing overview of Macron’s presidency and potential.
A political consultant surveys the career of Emmanuel Macron in this nonfiction work.
As an international political coach, former French diplomat, and author of multiple books on European high politics, Lefebvre is keenly aware of the political complexities of 21st-century Western Europe. Divided thematically in chapters that analyze Macron the “Shapeshifter,” “Reformer,” and “Crisis Manager,” to name a few, the book is part biography of the French president and part political commentary. Significant attention, for instance, is given to his romance with teacher-turned-wife Brigitte as well as its political ramifications, which included a smear campaign by Russian-funded media that was echoed by the French right alleging sexual abuse when Macron was 15 years old. Though described here as a “pragmatist,” Macron is also portrayed in these pages as unafraid to take “bold and dangerous” moves, as when he released a satirical video that went viral mocking President Donald Trump and entitled “Let’s Make the Planet Great Again.” Shortly after, Macron continued to goad Trump, confronting him at the G7 Summit with a “tense” handshake that he subsequently described to the French press as “a moment of truth” that signaled he “will not make small concessions.” Admittedly, this book was written before the 2022 French presidential runoffs and was published “in the middle” of Macron’s political career. While the outcome of the 2022 presidential election is still unknown, the work sees Macron as the titular “prototype for a new generation of world leaders.” As in any political narrative, Lefebvre writes, this story needs “bad guys,” and the “villains” here are right-wing populists, from Trump in America to Marine Le Pen in France and a host of “extreme-right” politicians on the rise in Hungary, Poland, and across the European Union. Written in an accessible prose for American audiences unfamiliar with the nuances of French domestic politics, this book effectively balances engagement with the general public with an erudite appraisal that will appeal to scholars and politicians familiar with European affairs. While a bit fawning at times, the work is nevertheless generally convincing in its political analysis.
An astute, engrossing overview of Macron’s presidency and potential.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59211-145-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gaudium
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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