Essential for understanding the right-wing rage that boils across America.
A war correspondent provides a crucial account of the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
“While they demonstrated their ability to attempt an insurrection…I have a hard time crediting them with the imagination necessary to conceive of one,” writes Mogelson, New Yorker staffer and winner of two National Magazine and two George Polk Awards, referring to the Proud Boys and other right-wing radicals who stormed the Capitol. The orders for that insurrection came from elsewhere, as a congressional investigation is now unveiling. Mogelson examines the uprising as the expression of a kind of free-floating White rage that he has been tracing over the last few years. His reporting has taken him to places such as Michigan, where, in 2020, thousands of Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, and other dissidents attempted to shut down the state capitol while others plotted to kidnap and perhaps even kill the state’s Democratic governor, who “had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation.” The Covid-19 pandemic was one spark, along with “a raging blizzard of propaganda [that] would completely blot out reality.” The reality that Mogelson presents is unrelentingly bleak, culminating in a vivid, and frightening, blow-by-blow account of the assault on the Capitol, which he witnessed firsthand. By not declaring himself a member of the press, he was able to move among figures such as the so-called QAnon Shaman, “who was carrying out a highly specific and consequential mission, from which he would not be deterred”—namely, to reclaim the Capitol for God by bellowing “shamanic songs” to activate the electromagnetic ley lines along which D.C. was supposedly built. (His mission ultimately ended in a sentence of 41 months in prison.) Other participants were much less woo-woo, of course, earnest in their mission to overturn the election and, in the bargain, hang Mike Pence for upholding the Constitution. Mogelson recounts the chaos in consistently striking, memorable detail.
Essential for understanding the right-wing rage that boils across America.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48921-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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