Written on behalf of the common man but best digested by policy wonks.
A legislator shares his thoughts on how to close our many digital divides.
Rep. Khanna, a Democrat, serves a Northern California district that’s home to big tech companies like Google and Apple, and while he respects their financial might, he is understandably skeptical of their libertarian rhetoric about technology alone resolving social and economic conflicts. Facebook supported his skepticism, with its promotion of misinformation and online divisiveness, not to mention its struggles with privacy. The author, who served as Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce, explores a wide range of issues tied to the tech industry: tech-job creation in rural America, racism and sexism within Silicon Valley, wage gaps, science-education funding, electric vehicles, antitrust, artificial intelligence, competition from China, and more. Khanna is a genial and clearheaded guide to these challenges, and he thoughtfully offers the occasional personal anecdote to contextualize specific problems, relating his visits to rural communities skeptical of tech interlopers making outsize promises or his own experiences with racism. Ultimately, he seeks an America that pays everyone decently, preserves communities, and protects internet users from exploitation and disinformation, and he bolsters his arguments with ideas from big thinkers such as Amartya Sen (who provides the foreword), Martha Nussbaum, and Tim Berners-Lee. The narrative centerpiece, an “Internet Bill of Rights,” is an admirable effort to codify those ideas. But the book is effectively a cascade of policy prescriptions: Dozens of sentences are teed up with phrasing like “we must,” “we need,” or “we should,” followed by recommendations regarding programs for tax credits, affordable housing, student laptops, and more. None are particularly objectionable, but eventually, the prose takes on the stiff and earnest feel of a stump speech. It’s less a book to be read than to be scanned through by politicos empathetic to Khanna’s politics—or tech lobbyists gathering opposition information.
Written on behalf of the common man but best digested by policy wonks.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982163-34-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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