A sensible, convincing program to expand voting rights and democratic virtues.
A rousing call for Gens Z and Alpha to leverage technology and save democracy.
“We are in the middle of a five-alarm fire, and mobile voting is the only scalable way to solve the primary turnout problem and put the fire out.” So writes Tusk, who had a variety of political jobs in the last few years, including a stint with fallen Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, convicted of multiple felonies, who had his 14-year sentence commuted by Donald Trump. Blagojevich, Tusk comments, had "the shockingly crazy and shockingly honest" opinion that his job was “winning elections, not actually being governor.” That leads Tusk to a hard political truth: the only time you matter to a politician is if you can help them win an election. So, he concludes, “the path to a better system is not about personalities, but about incentives....Hold [politicians] accountable for actual progress and actual results. And if they don’t deliver, you’ll throw them out.” Tusk's manifesto is far broader than its title suggests—he proposes term limits to combat political complacency—but the phone-voting piece is important. He has developed a secure voting system that gathers votes by means of encrypted cell messaging and tabulates them in clean rooms not connected to the internet, enhancing security. The system has obvious virtues, not least of them that virtually everyone has a cell phone, while not everyone (Native people on remote reservations, elderly shut-ins, military personnel outside the country, and so forth) can get to the polls. Couple this ease of technology with the fact that by 2028 the combined members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha will number 131 million, “the largest group of eligible voters in the country,” and Tusk sees them as inclined to the left. Small wonder that Republican legislators fear Tusk’s call—and good reason for progressive activists to take it up.
A sensible, convincing program to expand voting rights and democratic virtues.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781464221101
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
