A dynamic artistic rendering of chaos survived—at least so far.
An artist chronicles the headlines of an extraordinarily tumultuous year.
As Engler explains in the introduction, she had never imagined her work would find her bearing witness to such momentous upheaval. “I painted the day’s headlines,” she writes, “making a picture of the first few news items I heard emitting from my wooden bedside radio when I woke up each morning.” For much of her career, she writes, “my art had been about depicting the mundane or ordinary to create a big picture, working from the small and intimate to arrive at a greater whole.” Yet 2020 would confound everyone’s expectations, and revisiting it through Engler’s vivid drawings and sharp memories is enough to give anyone whiplash. The impeachment trials and the presidential campaigning dominated the news at the beginning of 2020, with the threat of pandemic barely a whisper. Even as that threat accelerated, there were countless mixed messages in the media, as the virus spread from China across the world, with concentrated outbreaks in New York and elsewhere around the country. By the end of March, the U.S. led the world in cases. A full month later, with the country in various states of shutdown, the same news cycle showed Dr. Anthony Fauci warning of worse to come in the fall and Jared Kushner hailing the administration’s containment of the virus as “a great success.” The author goes on to depict the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests, Trump and other associates testing positive, and the chaotic presidential election. The book ends with Joe Biden’s inauguration. Throughout, Engler combines the sharp eye of an editorial caricaturist with the vibrant color of a portraitist, and the energy of the artwork underscores the sense of urgency in the day's news. The accompanying text has a matter-of-fact tone that belies the powerful underlying sense that so much has gone seriously awry.
A dynamic artistic rendering of chaos survived—at least so far.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-82469-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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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BOOK REVIEW
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