A deeply researched political history and biography.
A chronicle of two fateful years in the White House.
Based on interviews with nearly 300 people in the inner circle of the Biden administration, as well as abundant published sources and government records, Atlantic staff writer Foer offers a brisk, detailed history of the president’s first two years in office, a crucial period that saw blunders and triumphs, deft maneuvering and lucky breaks. As the author sees it, Biden, whose “expertise was nose counting, horse trading, and spreading a thick layer of flattery over his audiences,” succeeded in his own heartfelt goal of proving “the eternal relevance of politics.” Among the president’s successes were the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with a focus on climate change; the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines throughout the country; the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court; and decisive leadership among the West over Ukraine. Foer examines Biden’s relationship with his vice president, Kamala Harris; and his protracted negotiations with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who mounted strong opposition to Biden’s Build Back Better plan, and with Pramila Jayapal, a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who did not want the plan watered down. While domestic challenges focused on Build Back Better, combatting the pandemic, and dealing with inflation, Biden faced critical foreign challenges. From longtime service as the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and eight years as vice president, Biden developed a “swaggering sense of his own wisdom about the world beyond America’s borders.” He was intent on withdrawing from Afghanistan, generating much debate about the consequences of leaving that nation to the Taliban. What Biden hoped would be an “orderly departure” resulted in chaos and a blight on the presidency. Acknowledging that Biden’s “great strength is his empathy,” Foer also sees that his verbal missteps and volubility have remained as shortcomings for the “Irish raconteur.” Overall, the author creates a respectful portrait of a savvy, dedicated politician.
A deeply researched political history and biography.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781101981146
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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