A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.
Lyons’ political treatise asserts that growing federal power and bureaucracy have undermined the Constitution, social cohesion, and individual liberty.
The author, an award-winning poet and third-generation printer, follows up The DNA of Democracy (2019) with this study of the inexorable transformation of the U.S. government over the past century—from an institution with limited power and respect for free markets and individual rights into an overweening “Administrative State.” The rot set in, he argues, under President Woodrow Wilson, whom he characterizes as believing the government should have unlimited power to shape society and control citizens; the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax, empowered that agenda by giving Washington vast financial clout, says the author. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal championed newly minted economic rights, he contends, while violating natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and further inflated the “Administrative State”by hatching federal agencies that heavily regulated the economy. Lyons praises Eisenhower’s interstate highway program but condemns Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan for increasing “government dependence” and urban-renewal schemes for bulldozing thriving, predominantly Black city neighborhoods. The author continues on to latter-day alleged federal overreaches, including President Barack Obama’s executive orders extending the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate bodies of water and carbon dioxide emissions. Lyons’ manifesto is a rebuke to big government and a paean to conservative values of faith, religion, individualism, free enterprise, and loyalty to what he sees as the Framers’ constitutional vision. His dissections of political philosophy are cogent and discerning, and his analyses of concrete policies are well thought out, employing elegantly aphoristic prose: “The Great Society…replaced property with government rental housing; it took the natural neighborhood and replaced it with centrally planned projects…it took away the family and replaced it with bureaucrats and social workers.” Democrats, among others, will find much to disagree with here. However, Lyons does offer a thoughtful, if sharp-elbowed, conservative challenge to center-left narratives of progress.
A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9973462-9-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Lylea Creative Resources
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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