A trove of facts about millennial voters and politicians that gives off a whiff of condescension to their elders.
Time magazine correspondent Alter’s debut looks beyond the stereotypes of millennials as “entitled” and “snowflakes” in a surprising group portrait of a new generation of political leaders.
Millennial voters lean left by a 2-to-1 margin, and they are unlikely to bear out the popular wisdom that people grow more conservative as they age, the author argues, backing up her conclusion with persuasive statistics and other hard data. Decades of social science research have shown that political views are formed in early adulthood, and “once young people pick a side, they usually stay there.” So America must come to grips with millennials’ priorities—such as climate change, student debt relief, and affordable health care—and Alter aims to help by combining a wide-angle view of her generation with close-ups of young elected officials. Along with a few Republicans, she profiles Democrats including Pete Buttigieg, the presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, mayor; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman; and Braxton Winston, a Charlotte city council member and veteran of street protests who decided to change the system from within after returning from a demonstration unable to “pick up his baby daughter because his dreadlocks had so much tear gas in them.” Alter can be glib (Afghan war veteran Buttigieg wasn’t a natural for the military because he “sucked at sports” and “hated fighting”) and, when writing about millennials’ parents, patronizing and cutesy: “The boomers were defined by a sense of individualism, so when they had kids, they weren’t just any kids: the boomers’ kids must be super-duper special.” However, the author’s spirited narrative offers much solid reporting on how millennials’ views have been shaped by forces like Instagram, the Harry Potter books, and the Occupy movement. Her young politicians emerge as less entitled than enthusiastic against the odds: Whatever their differences, most succeeded not by bowing to their parties’ tribal elders but by bushwhacking trails, often driven mainly by “instinct and grit.”
A trove of facts about millennial voters and politicians that gives off a whiff of condescension to their elders.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56150-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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 Yorkerstaff 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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