A concise and incisive look at a democracy in peril.
A former professor of public policy analyzes the roots and underlying structural causes of the 2021 insurrection.
Accounts of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol have tended toward insider narratives that focus on “rumor and gossip” rather than on the many different causes that worked together to instigate the event. Short carefully examines “two long-term processes that unfolded over decades and two shorter-term events that came into full force in 2020.” Long before Trump became president, the public was losing trust in government. Short offers the example of the eternal clash between states’ rights and federal supremacy, a contest that took its bloodiest form in the Civil War. Amid this ongoing battle, the author points to what he calls “a mounting democratic deficit,” which stems from issues such as a political system flooded by too much money and the engineering of specific political outcomes through gerrymandering. Political polarization, along with widening ideological rifts (fueled by an increase in conspiracy thinking) that transformed America into a flawed democracy, came to a head in early 2020 by the pandemic and the policing crisis. Trump’s blatant mishandling of the pandemic called his leadership competence into question. Yet when seething racial tensions in New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere boiled over into violent protests, Trump seized on the moment to pose as a “strong figure in a time of disorder” by contemplating the use of federal troops to quell the chaos. Short argues that it was not a stretch for Trump to go from that extreme to the even greater one of calling for military intervention in the face of election results unfavorable to him. This highly readable study will appeal to anyone seeking to make sense of the uprising that forever changed modern American politics.
A concise and incisive look at a democracy in peril.Pub Date: March 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781789148411
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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