A well-researched, dispiriting dissection of politics that lends a genealogy to homegrown authoritarianism.
Washington Post columnist Milbank locates the origins of the Jan. 6 insurrection in a GOP pivot 25 years earlier.
“Before the antigovernment MAGA…rallies, there were the rage-filled Tea Party town halls of 2010 and the Republican Revolutionaries of 1994, advised by [Newt] Gingrich to call Democrats ‘traitors,’ ‘sick,’ and ‘corrupt.’ ” As the author reminds us, at the time, Gingrich was briefly the speaker of the House of Representatives. Among Milbank’s rogues’ gallery are other figures familiar to us today, including Roe v. Wade opponent Brett Kavanaugh, who cut his teeth with a lingeringly obscene line of questioning of Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and “worked closely with cranks” to try to prove the Clintons’ role in Vince Foster’s notorious suicide. By Milbank’s account, the GOP’s assault on science, education, and democracy itself began with Gingrich’s cynical “contract with America,” only a couple of whose planks were ever made law—the most lasting a paperwork reduction act. Perhaps ugliest of all was Gingrich’s dog-whistling insistence on racist politics that pitted blue-collar and rural Whites against their imagined enemies, namely people of color. Gingrich and company were not above slandering their own, as with the assault on John McCain’s character in a campaign largely engineered by Karl Rove, who believed that “squandering national unity and politicizing war would win Bush seats.” That war, in Iraq, was driven by a habit of lying that Donald Trump would raise to an art form. Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, and others amplified the lies. Meanwhile, even though former Speaker of the House John Boehner glumly observes, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump Party,” the losing actors of yore are back, with Gingrich now serving as an adviser to Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy. “The man who started American politics down the road to destruction,” writes Milbank, “is returning to see his work completed.”
A well-researched, dispiriting dissection of politics that lends a genealogy to homegrown authoritarianism.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54813-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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