With the midterm elections looming, this detailed study of how campaigns work shines valuable light into dark corners.
A study of the secret machinery of politics that interprets the polls, creates the advertisements, and advises the candidates.
Sociology professor Laurison, who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, draws on interviews with the well-paid professionals (all pseudonymous) of a shadowy business. The author strikes a fairly even balance between Democrats and Republicans. Nearly all are White, college-educated, and from well-off families—a long way from the composition of the national polity. While most genuinely believe that a victory for their favored candidate will make the country better, they often see voters as passive players to be subdivided by various traits and manipulated for their votes, mostly via data. They see the candidate as a bundle of positive and negative characteristics whose main roles are to shake hands, raise money, and give tailored speeches. Working on a campaign is a grueling, exhausting job. Laurison asks, are they effective? Even successful politicos acknowledge that a great deal is out of their hands, determined by the broader environment and thematic issues. The author cites convincing research to show that campaign advertising, for example, does not do much, and voter attitudes are very difficult to change. One of the few campaign activities that seems to make a difference is grassroots contact, especially useful in reaching disinterested voters. But volunteer-based fieldwork is an area that professionals largely disregard. Laurison’s conclusions are interesting, but his own views occasionally distract from his reasoned analysis. Because he clearly loathes Trump and dislikes those who support him, he offers little examination of his 2016 campaign. If nothing else, Trump’s tactics—as dirty as they were—serve as intriguing examples of a successful insurgency campaign. Nevertheless, Laurison makes many important points about how politics reached its current state and where it might go from here.
With the midterm elections looming, this detailed study of how campaigns work shines valuable light into dark corners.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2506-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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