A revealing look at the numbers, how they’re derived and interpreted, and how they sometimes fail us. Timely reading for the...
The inside dope on how polls work—and don’t work—from CBS’s News Director of Elections and Surveys.
When the phone rings and someone asks for your opinion on a political matter, writes Salvanto, kindly take the call and give an answer. Polls are imperfect measures, but perhaps less imperfect than we think—especially, writes the author, if we disagree with the result. They differ, of course, and they can be errant in giving an impression of certainty when they indicate only probability; think of all the polls showing that Donald Trump had no chance of winning the last election. There is a vast difference between certainty and possibility, and while a good poll will indicate a range of possibilities and not a single outcome, we dislike guesses. “The very idea of expressing things in probabilistic terms is to express uncertainty,” Salvanto writes, “but too often everyone just wants to express things in quite the opposite fashion: as either yes or no.” Of those yes-and-no matters, there are many. The author looks closely at polls of gun owners and other putatively single-issue voters to find many points of agreement (“background checks, to rule out criminals and terrorists, find nearly universal favor, in principle, because they take action against bad actors rather than the weapon”) but also extremely broad areas of disagreement that often devolve into hatred. Conservatives agree on many points with liberals, but they’ll tell you that liberals are evil all the same, and vice versa. Salvanto notes that polling indicates that those who are most committed to a political party are most likely to characterize their opponents as enemies, even as, say, conservatives step away from traditional Republican ideology to say that government should do more to help solve economic problems.
A revealing look at the numbers, how they’re derived and interpreted, and how they sometimes fail us. Timely reading for the coming midterm elections.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7483-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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