A useful study of how the once-powerful NeverTrumpers sank into insignificance.
Requiem for the GOP’s anti-Trump movement.
Traditionally, the Republican Party in the U.S. espoused such conservative ideas as low taxes, limited government, a reliance on civil society, and a morality-based foreign policy. Then Donald Trump joined the race for president. At first, the Republican elite considered him a bottom-feeding con man who would soon be laughed off the stage. Instead, his popularity grew, and the party’s stalwarts formed a NeverTrump movement (as it is referred to throughout the narrative) to combat his rise. As political science professors Saldin and Teles demonstrate, they openly did everything they could to stop him, but the people who vote Republican nominated him anyway, and the NeverTrump effort began to crumble. A trickle of NeverTrumpers switching sides to Trump soon became a flood, and their work had given Trump a long list of enemies, which essentially eliminated virtually all experienced officials from even being considered for any government post. That left Trump with no choice but to name inexperienced, incompetent people to high government positions, which he did. In this scholarly, occasionally wonkish, but always readable and deeply insightful book, the authors, both of whom have written extensively about American public policy and legal and economic matters, describe the story of NeverTrump’s demise by focusing on four specific groups: national security professionals, who are the experts involved with foreign policy; political operatives, such as pollsters and fundraisers, who provide services to the party and its candidates; professional public intellectuals, such as think tank members, columnists and authors; and lawyers and economists. After clearly laying out how Trump has proceeded to exploit his power over anyone who would challenge him, the authors conclude that someday, both extremes will have to share power with a liberal-conservative faction grounded in free trade, pluralism, and constitutionalism.
A useful study of how the once-powerful NeverTrumpers sank into insignificance.Pub Date: May 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-088044-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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