Readers already convinced that leftists are the Orwellian thought police will find merit. Everyone else can pass.
A conservative writer attempts to link modern leftist moralizing and asceticism with the austere ideals of the Colonial Puritans.
Granted, the Puritans of yore believed in the perfectibility of humans, attained, in some instances, by regimes of social policing and self-denial. One might make a metaphorical stretch that pillorying someone on Facebook is the moral equivalent of putting them in the stocks. Rothman, associate editor of Commentary magazine, takes that stretch well past its breaking point in this denunciation of modern progressivism and those spoilsports who don’t like eating meat or jokes that play on ethnic slurs. To his credit, the author notes that moral policing was once the province of conservatives, but in his depiction of the modern left as a legion of fun-haters and life-deniers, he forgets that modern right-wingers are doing every bit of their part in keeping the culture wars going. “What I set out to do when I began to write this book was have some fun,” he writes, but his book is anything but. The author repeats his leftists-are-Puritans thesis to dulling effect (if anything, the true proponents of “cancel culture,” whether left or right, might be better likened to Red Guards), and his taunts about gender fluidity, veganism, taking a knee, and cultural appropriation wear thin very quickly. Indeed, the best glosses on much of Rothman’s material come not from him but from interlocutors such as the comedian Judy Gold, who remarks of potentially transgressive comedy, “When intent and context and nuance are taken out of the equation, it’s no longer a joke.” The author concludes by hoping his book gets publicly cancelled in order to boost sales. It’s perhaps likelier that it lands in the hands only of fellow true believers and won’t make much of a dent among anyone but them.
Readers already convinced that leftists are the Orwellian thought police will find merit. Everyone else can pass.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-316000-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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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