A thoughtful consideration of how and why to protect the vote—and, with it, American democracy.
A pertinent study of the possibility of “our next civil war,” which “is stalking us” after the 2020 election chaos and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“We believe many who cling to grievances about the 2020 election know, deep down, they are wrong,” write Garrett, chief Washington correspondent for CBS, and Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “They know lies are masquerading as truths. They rationalize both as tools in a large enterprise—defeating Democrats, reversing socialism, wokeness, radicalism, and the like.” Under the terms of the Trumpian big lie, Republican legislators are doing everything they can to redistrict, gerrymander, suppress, and otherwise alter the vote so that their minority party will always win, which shows which side of the “power or principle” argument they’re on. However, as the authors demonstrate, the big lie is about more than politics; it’s a moneymaking machine, practically a printing press, for Trump and company, who have raised hundreds of millions on the premise that they were wronged but will return. “Every big con needs its bagmen, and the attempted coup had a rogues’ gallery,” they write of Jan. 6 and its aftermath. “Some wore MAGA hats and carried Gadsden flags. Some wore suits or possessed law degrees and, in some cases, worked inside the White House.” The biggest con man of all remains diligent in his attacks on the democratic process and bloviating attempts to maintain his relevance and possibly regain power, even though he’s lost every legal challenge he’s mounted. But as his former aide Mick Mulvaney noted, “When you are taking your legal advice from My Pillow guy, what do you expect?” Unfortunately for the U.S., despite their bright, vigorous narrative, the authors seem to suggest that things are likely to get worse before they get better.
A thoughtful consideration of how and why to protect the vote—and, with it, American democracy.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63576-784-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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