A compelling account of political wrongdoing.
A journalist argues that Jan. 6, 2021, wasn’t the first instance of Republican treason.
The term “October surprise” describes a spectacular act or revelation meant to capture the hearts and minds of undecided voters. Ronald Reagan’s October surprise, by Unger’s account, was never made public: his intermediaries negotiated a deal, working with Israel, to ensure that the Iranians would not free the U.S. embassy workers they took hostage in November 1979 and held for 444 days. The aim was to make Jimmy Carter’s administration look feckless, and within minutes of being sworn in, Reagan announced that the hostages were freed, a seeming coincidence that in itself spoke of backroom bargains. “Carter had been told of clandestine dealings between Reagan campaign officials and the Iranians,” writes Unger, but the president did not make sufficient hay out of acts that, Unger holds, were treasonous. The deal was orchestrated by former CIA executive William J. Casey and two Iranian arms dealers, but it had plenty of ancillary players. It was also, Unger argues, an open secret, even though Iran’s deposed president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, publicly revealed “that the Republican campaign was making a concerted effort to bar the hostages’ release.” It took 11 years for Congress to investigate; by that time Casey was dead, George H.W. Bush—also an actor in the proceedings—was in office, and other acts of Reagan administration criminality were well known. Still, Unger says with regret, Americans were little worked up by the persistent revelations of that despicable political maneuvering. Unger’s book, which he has been working on for decades, comes late to the table, but it’s welcome all the same, complete with its gloomy conclusion: “Most Americans did not know their past well enough to have forgotten it.”
A compelling account of political wrongdoing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780063330603
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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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