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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
