A profound demolition of misguided gun-rights arguments and a compelling call to action.
A corrective consideration of the right to bear arms.
Erdozain delivers a formidable and timely argument: Contrary to the claims of contemporary gun rights advocates, the founders of the U.S. feared the prospect of armed individuals, and the Second Amendment was crafted to guarantee the existence of a supervised collective force rather than the rights of individual gun owners. The author delivers an illuminating survey of American gun culture, locating its origins in the institution of slavery and its gradual adoption of a dangerously fervent and often overtly racist nationalism. Along the way, Erdozain systematically exposes popular claims about gun rights as “an American birthright” as “a false and fabricated history.” The author demonstrates that a careful, honest, historically informed reading of the Constitution and Bill of Rights reveals an unambiguous intention to protect the nation from predictable excesses of personal liberty. Freedom would depend on restricting weaponry to government control. Among the many strengths of this book is the author’s incisive commentary on the catastrophic failure of legislative safeguards, especially in the last two decades. The inadequacy of the nation’s response to massive and routine gun violence has only become more pronounced during this time, the author argues persuasively, as attitudes of self-righteousness among gun owners are fueled by misunderstandings of both history and the lethal consequences of gun ownership. The most striking chapter comes, however, in a closely argued, withering analysis of the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, which seemed to willfully misread historical context in its ratification of personal gun rights. As dismal as Erdozain’s conclusions about the fate of gun regulation are, he nevertheless affirms, with some plausibility, his hope that the nation might “reclaim the concept of freedom from the weapons and the values that violate it.”
A profound demolition of misguided gun-rights arguments and a compelling call to action.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593594315
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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