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
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
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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