The crisp clarity of this collection doesn’t make up for its tendentious simplifications.
A veteran political writer assembles a collection of essays defending conservative principles.
Keating has had an impressive and long career as a conservative essayist; over the course of three decades, he’s written more than 8,000 pieces for various outlets, including the National Review. In this lengthy volume of nearly 700 pages, he collects a sampling of his works, which generally read like newspaper editorials—pithy, lucidly argued, stridently confident, and singularly partisan. He covers a remarkably broad landscape of intellectual ground on subjects such as free enterprise, Catholicism, President Donald Trump, and the estate tax, among many others. Keating is at his best when tackling the issue that introduced him to the world of conservative thought: the benefits of the free market. On this topic, he provides clearly articulated and snappily brief examples of common arguments. Some columns are too narrow to inspire broad interest, such as one about property taxes for Long Island golf courses. Overall, though, Keating’s writing has a pugnacious charm, especially when he rails against the largely liberal culture of New York City. However, the anthology as a whole lacks philosophical depth and nuance, and it won’t convince those who don’t already share the author’s political sensibilities; his undeveloped contention that liberalism is incoherent, for instance, won’t change any minds. He also provides little reflection on how his conservatism holds together theoretically and doesn’t contribute very much to ongoing debates about the incompatibility of free market individualism, limited government, and a Christian conception of a common good. This limitation is particularly disappointing, as today’s conservatism is in dire need of such disambiguation; instead, Keating portrays, without adequate argument, it as “traditional, American and Reagan-esque, firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian values, Western Civilization, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and some essential ideas and institutions, such as the Christian Church, the intrinsic value of each individual, the role of the family, freedom and individual responsibility, limited government, and free enterprise and free markets.”
The crisp clarity of this collection doesn’t make up for its tendentious simplifications.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 732
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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