An optimistic, if not particularly novel, conservative assessment of contemporary America.
McConkey, a Republican congressional candidate, presents his vision for American renewal in this nonfiction work.
“We are failing tomorrow’s future leaders,” the author declares in the opening lines to this debut book. Despite this ominous assertion, the author is generally positive in his faith in the American people and in the efficacy of his proposed solutions. The book’s central “blueprint” embodies the titular maxim to “be the weight behind the spear,” a practice McConkey hopes that Americans “can and should do to help our country be a better place.” Per the analogy, a spear is “just a useless, pointy stick without the training, teamwork, and ‘weight’ behind it.” A renewed emphasis on “family values, integrity, leadership, and accountability,” the author suggests, offers the promise of a new dynamism to help propel the American spear into the future. According to the author, an emergency physician and current commander of the 459th Aeromedical Staging Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, an energized American public offers citizens a better livelihood and is essential to the country’s geopolitical competition against “cohesive and determined” rivals in Russia and China. On its surface, the book offers a nonpartisan appeal to American unity, with no recent presidential candidate or political party referred to by name. It is, however, a deeply political book, especially given the author’s current campaign as a Republican candidate for a North Carolina congressional seat. Most of the book’s stances echo conservative talking points regarding issues such as securing the southern border and opposition to hypothetical Covid-19 vaccine mandates. One chapter-length critique of socialism focuses on government overreach by “Bernie” and “Elizabeth” (not-so-thinly veiled references to Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren). Eschewing the firebrand rhetoric and conspiracy-laden fearmongering of right-wing populists, the book instead reflects a quaint brand of conservatism reminiscent of the Reagan era in is patriotic view of America’s history and future. While some liberal readers may welcome this appeal as a more level-headed approach, many will still be irked by the book’s failure to engage with cultural issues, from abortion and gender-affirming care to systemic racism and inequality.
An optimistic, if not particularly novel, conservative assessment of contemporary America.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9798988172208
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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