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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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