Readers in Texas—and even nationally—who want change should pay attention and get started on the author’s to-do lists. She...
How to change the political landscape in Texas, “the reddest of the red-hot states, covered by a big bubble that protects the most reactionary, radical, and rabid set of officeholders that much of the country has ever seen.”
As Ann Richards’ campaign manager in 1990 and 1994, Rogers (Cold Anger: A Story of Faith and Power Politics, 1990) watched as the Democrats ignored warning signs and the Republicans took over the state. The Democratic Party was locked in internecine warfare, spewing out grievances dating back to Reconstruction, and Republicans rejected the 1950s-era anti-communist hysteria and John Birch Society as bad for business and moved to the middle. The author explains the strange world of Texas: its complexity, diversity, special interests, and political history. Only with a sense of Texas’ sincere hatred of any and all government since the Civil War can one understand how to secure the vote. The author’s disappointments, morphing into real bitterness, show throughout the book; she calls Texas the “reddest wacko state in the union.” The takeover of the state by Republicans was complete by 1998, when they won every statewide elected office and just about obliterated the Democratic Party. Texas is her story, but the practices and politics used have spread to the rest of the country. The imprint of Texas Republicans can be seen in the leadership of the tea party, gerrymandering of congressional seats, mega donors, tort reform, and elsewhere. When she calms down, Rogers provides genuinely sharp insight into where the Democrats went wrong. She explains how they must copy the successful methods of the Republicans, microtargeting Hispanics, blacks, and cynical whites. She notes that the price of oil plays a large part in party power switching, especially the governor’s office, which she considers of primary importance.
Readers in Texas—and even nationally—who want change should pay attention and get started on the author’s to-do lists. She knows the territory, and she wants it back.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07908-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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