by Alan Huffman & Michael Rejebian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2012
A good book for anyone who has wondered how scandalous past behavior makes its way into campaign headlines.
A bright romp through the world of opposition political research.
Since 1993, former journalists Huffman (Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, 2009, etc.) and Rejebian have worked in “oppo,” gathering damaging information on political candidates and their opponents in local, state and national elections. “Everything we cite in our reports must be thorough, honest, accurate and, as we can’t stress enough, documented,” they write. How clients use the information is a different story. In this revealing, anecdote-filled account, the authors describe a year of investigations that took them from front porches to courthouses to presidential libraries in search of “political intel.” We see them reviewing municipal records under guard, pitching prospective clients, fending off difficult people, fielding suspicious phone calls and using ingenious methods to deal with officious government clerks. No one knows quite what to make of them (“Who did you say you’re with?”), and they vacillate privately over their own identity, seeing themselves on one hand as journalists without bylines and on the other as “part investigator, part critic, part paid informant.” In fact, they are partners in the political research firm Huffman & Rejebian, part of a multimillion-dollar industry that is “a crucial underpinning” of American politics. Ironically, the authors are not deeply political people; they express disgust at the nastiness of American politics and amazement at the undocumented claims some candidates will make to get elected. They refuse to rely solely on online sources (often inaccurate or incomplete) and instead beat a path by foot to the doors of ex-wives and others in the know. They say many candidates don’t know what’s in their own record and don’t want to. One prospective candidate, confronted with an incident report about the beating he gave his girlfriend at an airport, dropped his plans to run.
A good book for anyone who has wondered how scandalous past behavior makes its way into campaign headlines.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-201577-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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