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MITCH, PLEASE!

Name: MITCH, PLEASE!
Author: Matt Jones
ISBN: 978-1-982142-04-9

HOW MITCH MCCONNELL SOLD OUT KENTUCKY (AND AMERICA, TOO)

by Matt Jones with Chris Tomlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020

A tendentious but effective combination of description and vivisection.

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The founder of Kentucky Sports Radio chronicles his travels around Kentucky and his disdain for Mitch McConnell, who “is quite simply everything wrong with American politics in 2020.” Jones and his companion, Tomlin, who mostly contributes snarky footnotes and humorous barbs, visited all the state’s 120 counties, talking with a wide array of locals—from right to left—about McConnell, political issues, sports, and other topics. The author found himself uniformly welcome (except, oddly, in one church); he even befriended the “tracker” whom McConnell’s team sent to follow him around in search of gaffe and dirt. Throughout the book, Jones employs a sharp political scalpel, eviscerating McConnell. Those looking for a disinterested analysis of the senator will not find it here—as the subtitle broadcasts. The author assails McConnell for his numerous flaws: flipping on issues (abortion rights), hypocrisy (on the power of money in political campaigns), and favoring the rich over most of his constituents. Ultimately, writes Jones, McConnell is “a soulless political being.” We also learn about the author’s history (his father left the family when he was young), his struggles with epilepsy, and his growing realization that if he decides to run for office, McConnell will do his utmost to destroy him. Most effective are the author’s descriptions of the towns and sites he visited and the people he met. In the small cafes, on farms, at festivals and colleges—Jones came to see that there were three issues that dominate the political debate in Kentucky: God, guns and babies, a list that serves as one of his chapter titles. Regarding guns, he writes, “McConnell has repeatedly refused to advance any gun control legislation after each of our nation’s many mass school shootings.” Jones notes how the GOP pounds away at those issues, knowing that many in Kentucky rank below them such issues as health care and the environment. A tendentious but effective combination of description and vivisection.

Pub Date: March 31, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-982142-04-9

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

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New York Times Bestseller

ELON MUSK

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

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Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.