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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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