A concise and prudent discussion of the nation’s bitter political contentions.
Paepke, a former practicing attorney, examines divisiveness and political dysfunction in the United States and proposes a plan for moving forward in this nonfiction work.
The author observes that, contrary to popular belief, the ideological polarization that currently beleaguers the United States is not the historical norm; in fact, following World War II, the country leapt “from strength to strength,” and, despite genuine political disagreement, reasonable compromises and consensus among citizens were concretely brokered. However, this is no longer the case—today, the least temperate members of the citizenry elect the least moderate politicians, and deeply divisive figures like Donald Trump and Joe Biden continue to win nominations for the presidency despite their lack of general support. Paepke asserts that this state of affairs has been engendered in part by an irresponsible media that intentionally stokes the flames of political acrimony and by a presidential primary nomination process designed to prefer voters “louder, angrier, and more extreme than mainstream Americans.” The result, in his estimation, has been a loss of shared national identity and purpose. “This extreme political climate has overflowed into broader society and everyday life. The shared sense of community has declined. Americans increasingly choose their states, their neighborhoods, their social lives, and their friends based on political compatibility. The choice of news and information sources too often becomes a definitive pledge of allegiance.” With great clarity and analytical meticulousness, Paepke sketches a sober, centrist political platform—which would seem to have broad appeal among voters—including positions on crime, climate control, and foreign policy. The author offers much more than a lament; he foresees a future in which widespread discontent is channeled into substantive political action and recommends that either the nomination process be radically revised or that the primaries be bypassed altogether by a presidential candidate independent of the two main parties. Paepke’s important and hopeful contribution is an impressive example of what he preaches: a common-sense pragmatism that earnestly seeks out centrist compromise.
A concise and prudent discussion of the nation’s bitter political contentions.Pub Date: June 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781637557419
Page Count: 190
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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