by Elizabeth Dias & Lisa Lerer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2024
Devoid of rhetoric, this evenhanded work exemplifies outstanding reportage.
A thorough investigation into how Roe v. Wade fell.
“The antiabortion movement succeeded because most people did not believe it would.” So write Dias, national religion correspondent for the New York Times, and Lerer, a Times political reporter, who interviewed hundreds of people and reported from 16 states and the District of Columbia. The authors organize the 36 chapters into four chronological parts. “The Righteous Fight” begins with the huge influence of Marjorie Dannenfelser, an antiabortion activist who viewed the movement as “a spiritual battle about what it means to be human.” The authors go on to chronicle the history of Planned Parenthood, long supported by Republicans. In the second part, “The Political War,” Dias and Lerer delineate how that support turned into opposition as the organization came to represent “the diminished power of traditional religion, gender roles, and families in American life.” In a culture where Democratic voters proved to be unmotivated by abortion, the antiabortion movement was reemerging and gaining momentum among Republicans, especially social conservatives. “For more than forty years, the antiabortion movement was David, fighting Goliath,” write the authors, “but the country had shifted, and they were giants.” The third section, “The Chessboard,” covers Trump’s election and details how he garnered support among antiabortion voters. Following his victory, liberals were caught off guard; they had no planned response to the threat against abortion rights. In “The Fate of the Nation,” the authors examine Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and how the Supreme Court became “more conservative than at any other point in modern history.” At that point, antiabortion leaders were able to flip the court. The book’s greatest strength is the authors’ comprehensive and incisive approach to explaining that “Roe did not just fall once, on June 24, 2022. Roe collapsed over a transformational decade.”
Devoid of rhetoric, this evenhanded work exemplifies outstanding reportage.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781250881397
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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New York Times Bestseller
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
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