A distinctive addition to the plethora of works on the 2016 presidential election.
A debut political book offers an in-depth study of the 2016 presidential election’s eight “faithless electors.”
While most political junkies examined the unprecedented nature of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Conrad was fascinated by the underreported stories about the eight so-called faithless electors who cast ballots that went against the popular vote of their states in the Electoral College. The driving questions behind the author’s work lie not in constitutional debates surrounding the legality of faithless electors or the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College, but in the eight electors themselves. “Who were these people who were willing to completely alienate themselves from their respective political parties?” she asks. Indeed, the bulk of the book is devoted to telling the stories of the electors, often in their own words and with little editorial comment by Conrad. Though the electors were willing to buck their political parties, they came from diverse ideological and social backgrounds. The eight men and women included a founder of an anti-abortion organization, a devoted libertarian and follower of Ron Paul, an Uber driver, a Hispanic community college student, a committed Bernie Sanders advocate, and an environmentalist. Regardless of ideology and party, the eight electors disproportionately came from minority ethnic groups, such as Baoky Vu, a former South Vietnamese refugee and self-described “Reaganite and big-tent conservative” who opposed Trump. Two Native Americans were among the Democrats who refused to back Hillary Clinton. In addition to its intimate vignettes about the eight electors, the book is full of captivating and well-designed infographics and charts. Conrad also provides readers with an effective primer on the arcane intricacies of the Electoral College and the 12th Amendment. Though some readers may seek more analysis and commentary from the author, her deeply human approach that centers on the personal lives of the eight electors is a welcome alternative to a genre dominated by hyperpartisan pundits. By pushing Trump and Clinton out of the spotlight, the book is also an implicit celebration of democracy with an unrelenting focus on state and local activists willing to stand up against members of their own parties.
A distinctive addition to the plethora of works on the 2016 presidential election. (acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73503-840-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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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