A plea for the importance of history in the study of leadership.
A professor of leadership and history reflects on influential political leaders.
Temkin, a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and author of The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, asks whether leaders make history or the historical moment makes the leader. The answer is both. To argue his case, the author looks at leaders under different conditions: in times of crisis (Herbert Hoover, Huey Long, and Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression); under tyranny (the French resistance during the Vichy regime); when past decisions severely constrain present choices (the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki); when leadership fails (Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War); and under colonial and authoritarian regimes (Algeria’s war for independence). Temkin casts suffragist movement leaders Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul as successes in the face of entrenched power, and he uses Martin Luther King Jr. to illustrate the claim that a leader has to leave a legacy. Although the author excels at providing historical context, he offers little about the “the art of leadership.” His focus is the consequences of leadership—good leaders “do not even need to be warriors, rebels, or saints. In our current condition, it may be enough that they simply want to help the public”—and not how leaders achieve their goals. That Temkin’s interest is confined to the politically famous—leaving aside university presidents, corporate heads, labor leaders, and directors of charitable organizations—further limits his perspective. The book’s title is also problematic. The author is never explicit about why the categories of fighting for a noble cause, overcoming oppression, and sacrificing oneself to the greater good are helpful for distinguishing among leaders and understanding leadership. In fact, he attests that the “best” leaders are all three—e.g., the suffragists were “committed warriors,” “determined rebels,” and “reluctant saints.”
A plea for the importance of history in the study of leadership.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781541758476
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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
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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BOOK REVIEW
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