Accessible and urgent civic advice—hopefully, those who need it will pay attention.
The creator of the popular PoliticsGirl media brand weighs in on the countless problems with the U.S. government and political system and how to fix some of them.
Taking her cue from Thomas Paine, McGowan offers “Six American Principles” that offer Americans a way to free themselves from the tyranny of political dysfunction and rebuild a broken democracy. The first principle—America is the land of freedom—has undergirded the thinking of citizens and politicians for nearly 250 years. However, the author argues persuasively that some Americans, by virtue of race, class, and gender, are freer than others, and many of them actively use their power to oppress others. She traces the origins of this problem back to the white, land-owning, male framers and the documents they created as guidelines for the “American experiment.” To ratify the Constitution, they made allowances for slavery, granted smaller states equal power in the Senate, and counted African Americans as three-fifths of a person. If racism, inequality, political gridlock, and corruption have overwhelmed the body politic, it is because they grew out of these exclusions and exceptions. The other principles McGowan brings forward—for example, that everyone should have the opportunity to rise and that the law applies to every single citizen, regardless of status—will remain ideals for as long as these issues go unresolved. She further observes that adherence to long-standing political traditions, including lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, must be reconsidered, even if that means amending the Constitution, which the framers intended as a “living document” for a developing nation. For true change to happen, American citizens must put aside their complacency and vote while actively holding those in power accountable: “The question is: Are we willing to work for it?”
Accessible and urgent civic advice—hopefully, those who need it will pay attention.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668066430
Page Count: 240
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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