An intriguing window into Republican primary politics.
Spurlino shares lessons learned from an unsuccessful congressional bid in this debut political memoir.
As the old adage goes, failure is a better teacher than success. That’s the premise of this memoir by a businessman who ran for Congress in 2016. “I lost,” writes Spurlino in his introduction. “I didn’t lose in the general election. I lost in the Republican primary. I finished fourth, receiving only 7 percent of the vote. That’s not the typical profile of someone who writes a book about politics.” Even so, his frontline perspective offers insight into the modern American political campaign: who runs for office, how and why they run, how they win, and—more often—how they lose. The author decided to throw his hat into the ring after learning that his congressman, Speaker of the House John Boehner, had announced his retirement. He then began the strange, sometimes comical process of hiring a campaign team, staking out official positions on major issues (many of them more conservative than his actual beliefs), paying someone to perform opposition research on himself, filming an announcement video, and drumming up political support. Spurlino’s insider’s view convinced him that the American campaign system needs profound changes, both in laws governing elections and in the culture of party politics. Spurlino’s prose is conversational and direct, and his persona is often that of a naïve Everyman learning about politics in real time, which sometimes makes for amusing reading: “I was a little surprised that Israel would be a campaign issue,” he writes; but later he found out that the other candidates likely wouldn’t be attending an upcoming event organized by pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and that his presence there could win him some votes: “And with that, I officially became a supporter of AIPAC and Israel.” Spurlino’s after-the-fact suggestions for improving the political system—including ranked-choice voting—will likely divide his readership. The book’s greatest value is the way in which it charts the Trump-ification of the Republican Party over the course of 2016.
An intriguing window into Republican primary politics.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63755-236-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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