An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.
Musings on our pop-culture pasts.
Blending memoir and pop criticism, Madison’s essays lace deeply intimate stories with lavish praise and punishing blows for icons of the ’80s and on. A critic, podcast host, and TV writer, Madison pulls few punches as he lures readers into a deep nostalgia. “The beauty of nostalgia,” he writes, “is that most people forget the things that they hated about something they love.” We remember a star or a show for a moment—a song or a scene that fixated us at the time, or simply because those were the people we told our friends we loved and so defined our lives. If this retrospective flattening offers us a more cohesive view of the past, then Madison is adept at re-creating the seamlessness with which media and real life can sometimes mesh. The memoir aspects of developing an understanding of his sexuality and self-image, parsing through family dynamics, and ricocheting between majority Black and majority white spaces in education are shot through with notes on Oprah, The O.C., Tom Cruise, the Power Rangers, and even Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Where the author pauses to pull apart the seams, he reveals an absurdity hidden beyond our memory. Madison’s ability to re-create the limelight, then cast withering shade, is insightful. Writing of Cruise—“a soulless cipher skilled at mimicking human emotion”—he describes the actor as “approximat[ing] human behavior in a way that makes you think he’s learning how humans interact with one another, not merely observing and deciphering it like most actors.” A brilliant critical voice for millennials, those on the cusp, or anyone who has had their eyes open over the past few decades, Madison proves a worthy successor to his own idol, Chuck Klosterman.
An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593446188
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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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