by Michael Signer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2009
Makes a forceful case for civic engagement and eternal vigilance.
Policy advisor Signer provides an overview of the larger-than-life villains who undermine democracy, and the safeguards we rely on to defeat them.
The author, who holds senior positions at two liberal think tanks, views the problem of demagoguery as both timeless and immediate. Among the “new cast of cagey, aggressive mass leaders” confronting the United States and attempting to install autocratic governments in their homelands at the beginning of the 21st century, he includes Hugo Chávez, “furiously charismatic” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iraqi Shiite firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr. Signer finds their historical forerunner in Cleon of Athens, who argued in the fifth century BCE that “political decisions should be guided by a harsh calculation of self-interest, no matter the human cost or the sacrifice of our ideals.” Fortunately, the author argues, Cleon’s demagoguery “triggered a wave of self-criticism and self-restraint among Athenians that ultimately helped democracy survive; their example echoes today as a powerful but forgotten answer to democracy’s demagogue problem.” Even identifying a demagogue can be slippery, he acknowledges, offering a checklist of four points first promulgated in James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 essay, “On Demagogues.” They present themselves as men of the common people, exploit that connection viscerally in a way that accentuates their widespread popularity, manipulate it for their own ends and are willing to violate established rules of conduct, even laws. Huey Long represents the quintessential American demagogue, in Signer’s judgment. Contrastingly, George W. Bush cannot be considered a demagogue, because “he was not a man of the common people, and he did not inspire overpowering emotional reactions among them.” The author constructs a muscular narrative to support his definitions and address disturbing questions, though he spends too much time on side issues such as Hannah Arendt’s decades-long attempt to grapple with her former teacher and lover Martin Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies and what they revealed about the failings of his philosophy.
Makes a forceful case for civic engagement and eternal vigilance.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60624-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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