A book of disturbing gun crime data lacking a productive argument.
Fraga chronicles America’s gun crisis in this debut nonfiction work.
In 2016, the author received a Christmas newsletter from some friends in which he learned that the couple’s son, a college student, had been shot six times by a stranger at a highway rest stop. Though the son survived, his horrific experience stuck with Fraga. “An extraordinary story?” writes the author. “An isolated instance of butchery? Not so extraordinary, unfortunately. Not so isolated either. The country is awash in guns. People use them to kill other people.” With this book, the author, a retired professor, documents the proliferation of appalling and grief-inducing incidents of gun violence that have marred contemporary American life, including infamous mass shootings and smaller events like the one that affected his friends’ son. He traces America’s history with the subject, from the days of Bleeding Kansas to the long tradition of political assassination, exploring the ways that American gun culture has become more radical over time. Related issues of racism, police violence, mental health, and suicide are discussed, as are the numerous ways that efforts to legislate gun control have been stymied at all levels of government. Fraga is a skilled writer, and his matter-of-fact prose captures the mundane terror of these stories, as when he describes the University of Texas tower shooting: “Dressed in overalls, he identified himself as a research assistant, there to deliver some equipment. The ‘equipment’ he was carrying in a trunk included three rifles, two pistols, and a sawed-off shotgun. The elevator wasn’t working, but an employee activated it. Whitman was duly appreciative.” The book’s title is an apt one; it reflects not only the seemingly endless cycle of mass shootings covered by the media, but also the experience of reading this book, which is more an almanac of tragedy than a call to action. The author offers familiar proposals unlikely to be implemented (and unlikely to stem the tide if they were), leaving the reader with little beyond a deep sense of despair.
A book of disturbing gun crime data lacking a productive argument.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-941237-99-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Anamcara Press LLC
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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