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
BOOK REVIEW
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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