Packed with interesting, useful information, but ultimately lacking cohesion.
A political consultant’s thoughts and predictions regarding America's increasing Latino population.
A self-proclaimed “political data guy,” Madrid, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, has amassed compelling statistics on voters generally and Latino (the term the author prefers over Latinx, “a political term, not a community term”) voters in particular. The author attempts to synthesize decades of experience in service of understanding and engaging Latino voters, who have been ignored or taken for granted, misrepresented, and, perhaps most critically, left uncompelled by either of America’s major political parties to participate in the civic process. The first half of the text is a sort of political autobiography, outlining Madrid’s Republican identity forged in the Reagan era, his campaign work in his home state of California and on the national level—which reached a crescendo during George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign—and a defection from the GOP in the Trump years. Both Madrid's professional rise and his partisan disenchantment demonstrate his enthusiasm for the political process and his fervent belief in the power of the Latino community as a voting bloc. He issues calls to action for both Democrats and Republicans to acknowledge and court this power with aspirational messages and policies that address the needs of a rapidly assimilating group. However, chunks of text spent on details of political ad campaign purchases and quotes by the author in the press would have been better used fleshing out the meaning, context, and implications of Madrid’s data. The author struggles to convincingly support many of his most potentially insightful points—e.g., Latino voters’ rightward shift, ideas for engaging Latinos in swing states, and their relative prioritization of cultural or economic issues. Madrid’s detours stifle the potential for deeper analysis that he is in such a distinct position to provide.
Packed with interesting, useful information, but ultimately lacking cohesion.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781668015261
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
