One of the best books in the growing library surrounding the 2020 election—must reading for politics observers.
A steely-eyed dissection of the Trumpian “stop the steal” conspiracy and its madcap fomenters.
Bowden is known for writing on war (Black Hawk Down) and crime (Killing Pablo). In this first-rate collaboration with journalist Teague, he combines both in examining the pitched battles mounted by Trump supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The authors open with an incident when, in Atlanta, an overflowing urinal flooded a room below where ballots were being tallied; the count ceased and the ballots were placed in water-safe containers—only to be replaced, Trump supporters insisted, with ballots for Biden. The same was alleged to be true in other battleground states, including Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, where, admittedly, a few mistakes occurred owing to confusion in procedures for mail-in ballots. Regarding these mistakes, the authors write, “In an ordinary election, they might result in an angry letter to a precinct captain. But this year, they, like the leaky urinal in Atlanta, were all going to become a big deal.” They were a big deal because Trump had bellowed for months that if he lost the election, it would be because the Democrats cheated—the same tactic he deployed in 2016 when he anticipated a defeat to Hillary Clinton. “Never in America’s history…had a losing presidential candidate argued that the whole nation had been swindled,” write Bowden and Teague, relying on intrepid on-the-ground reporting. Nonetheless, millions of Americans believed that it was rigged—though fewer than one might think, while meanwhile, millions more loyal Republicans (including the attorney for Maricopa County, Arizona, a son of Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy) accepted the fact that Biden won. The fight will continue, write the authors, even as wise voices hopefully prevail, such as another GOP loyalist who commented, “Harm does come from witch hunts, even if you’re not a witch.”
One of the best books in the growing library surrounding the 2020 election—must reading for politics observers.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5995-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2022
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
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