A smart book that invites argument—civil argument, that is, with good faith and tolerance.
A vigorous defense of free speech, a right enshrined but often hobbled or outright abrogated.
The American nation was born in rage, writes legal scholar Turley, and rage has since often defined its politics. This is especially true today, in a “period of such public distemper where our most cherished institutions and rights are being questioned by both the left and the right.” By Turley’s account, speech that expresses that rage certainly falls within acceptable limits; it’s the litmus test of falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater that, among other tests, gauges whether speech is protected. Examining free speech from the time of Socrates on, the author analyzes its countless discontents: the Red Scare legislators, for instance, for whom agitating against the big bosses constituted sedition, judicial constraints against “fighting words,” and so on. On either side of the political divide today, calls for censorship and speech suppression are rampant. However, it’s in the academy in particular that the disdain for unfettered free speech comes through most clearly, and Turley’s examples are striking. “By declaring speech as harmful,” he writes of censorious academics, “they give themselves license to stop views from being expressed.” The author parses recent events through the lens of free-speech absolutism, concluding, for instance, that Trump was within his rights to call for his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—where, of course, so many of them committed non-speech-related crimes of violence. (But what of Trump’s claim that he would pay the legal fees for anyone who assaulted protestors at his rallies?) “We have a right to rage,” Turley insists. However—and he might have emphasized this more—we also have the duty to keep speech from crossing into violence.
A smart book that invites argument—civil argument, that is, with good faith and tolerance.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781668047040
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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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