An urgent message to a beleaguered party and distressed voters.
An argument for why a progressive Democrat is crucial for saving the country.
American Prospect co-founder and co-editor Kuttner (Social Policy/Brandeis Univ.; Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, 2018, etc.) offers a cogent, hard-hitting analysis of current threats to democracy, calling for the election of a progressive Democrat as president in 2020, someone “with a narrative, a manifesto, a rallying of the citizenry, and a set of policies at least as radical as those of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Like many other recent political analysts—Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny), David Runciman (How Democracy Ends), and Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains), to name a few—Kuttner sees Trump as “a sociopathic tyrant” who must be removed from office, if not through impeachment, then surely in the next presidential election. But, he asserts, “American democracy has been fraying for decades” because of “the crowding out of civic participation by money and by media, and the concentration of wealth that in turn concentrates political power.” In the last 40 years, Americans have seen their economic prospects diminish and cynicism about politics increase. Kuttner disputes the idea that Democrats need to be more conciliatory (Barack Obama’s efforts to extend olive branches was futile, he insists) and to appeal to some imagined moderate constituency. “A large majority of Democrats are substantively progressive” on issues such as minimum wage, a large infrastructure program, free public universities, and universal health care. In the 2018 midterms, “many Democrats did win as progressives, and in unlikely places.” The fight for democracy, though, will not be won simply by reclaiming the White House. The author delineates important themes for a new president: restoring America’s role “as a beacon of liberty, common purpose, and broadly shared prosperity”; rebuilding domestic industry and infrastructure; regulating capitalism; expanding the Supreme Court to override the conservative lock; ensuring economic security for future generations; offering access to health care for all; and addressing income inequality. Policy strategies, he argues, must supplement “the most difficult and urgent challenge”: “to damp down the hatreds so cynically stoked by Donald Trump.”
An urgent message to a beleaguered party and distressed voters.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00365-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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