A polemic that will arouse conservatives and irritate liberals.
The former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal adds to the why-American-society-is-in-such-a-mess genre.
Baker, now a WSJ editor at large and a regular commentator on Fox News, maintains that he is nonpartisan and that “there is plenty of blame to go around,” but readers will quickly discover that he is an old-school conservative. Like many traditional conservatives, the author deplores Donald Trump and his followers. However, if forced to choose between a die-hard, right-wing conspiracy theorist and a conventional liberal, he would throw up his hands in despair. Baker blames much of our current crisis on “the rapid advance in progressive ideologies in American institutions in the last thirty years or so.” Perhaps his greatest anger is directed at his own profession, journalism, which—with the exception of his WSJ—has dropped all pretense of objectivity. “Taking their cue from Karl Marx,” news organizations refuse to merely report the world but work actively to change it. Baker also excoriates American universities, a conservative bugbear long dominated by liberals who shout down guest speakers and harass nonconformist professors. Least effective is the author’s chapter on the medical profession, an uncomfortably Trumpian attack on pandemic-era public health measures. He mostly denounces quarantines as hysterical fearmongering, and he maintains that vaccines, although modestly effective, have been oversold and should be voluntary. Since he blames America’s “cultural revolution” on a powerful, isolated cabal and opposes violence, his conclusion is short on specifics. He places his trust in the blameless, salt-of-the-earth American citizenry who “believe in traditional American values and ideals, put American…interests ahead of global concerns, and favor tough immigration restrictions and the reassertion of American sovereignty.” Although Baker believes in climate change, he also argues that the matter is overblown and that “climate extremism” is the new global religion, “a temporal canon, with its own moral and doctrinal heft.”
A polemic that will arouse conservatives and irritate liberals.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781538705704
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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