Intelligent, well-informed essays from a promising if occasionally pedantic writer.
A probing essay collection that tackles relevant issues emerging in America’s current shaky political and social climate.
In “Consciousness Razing,” Swanson recounts his experience at a “manhood-confirming” adventure retreat hosted by a men’s encounter group called Evryman. As the weekend’s activities triggered strong emotional reactions, the author questioned the intent of such movements. “The relevant question for me…is whether this torrent of emotion is a meaningful intervention into the debate about masculinity,” he writes, “whether Evryman is treating the symptom or the cause.” In his account of his time at a convention for fans of The West Wing, Swanson reflects on the renewed interest in the series as a signal of a nostalgic yearning for its idealistic portrayal of governance. “Whereas Obama followed the rules of Aristotelian drama and thus resembled a president from Aaron Sorkin’s imagination,” writes the author, “Trump obeyed the anti-narratives of reality television, where what matters most is not coherence or logical progression, but chaos and titillation.” The title essay follows Swanson’s visit to a psychic convention in upstate New York, a journey prompted by the experiences of his brother, who had suffered a brain injury that caused him to experience psychic visions. This is one of the more compelling and moving pieces, as the author delves informatively into the dynamics of the sibling relationship and reflects on his struggles with depression. With the exception of a couple pieces that miss the mark in their humorous aim—e.g., visiting the massive Noah’s Ark waterpark in Wisconsin—these are mostly tuned-in, absorbing essays. However, the author sometimes relies too heavily on affected wordplay that doesn’t always match the subject matter. In comparison to the crisp prose of a few contemporaries—Jia Tolentino and Zadie Smith come to mind—Swanson’s overly mannered style can be distracting. If he can rein in the tendency to overwrite, this could be the start of a fruitful career.
Intelligent, well-informed essays from a promising if occasionally pedantic writer.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64009-418-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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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