A dispiriting though deeply meaningful tour of bad-news numbers that mark a frightful national decline.
We have captains aplenty and loads of technology—and yet, writes entrepreneur and NYU marketing professor Galloway, the ship of state is lost at sea.
A little of the “adrift” metaphor goes a long way, but the author makes good points. For example, we all have powerful computers in our pockets, yet we fail to forge connections that advance the interests of the commonwealth. Moreover, although Galloway is intent on proving his thesis with meaningful numbers, we don’t seem to be capable of fixing major problems: the fact, for instance, that in 1966, “the U.S. committed 2.5% of its potential GDP to infrastructure development,” whereas today the number is 1.3%. Furthermore, “about 1 in every 5 U.S. roads is in poor condition. Forty-five percent of Americans do not have access to public transit. A water main break occurs every two minutes.” Meanwhile, the number of workers in the financial sector who populate the ranks of the ultrawealthy has doubled in the past four decades, and most of them know how to skirt tax laws. Corporate profits are more than double the percentage of employee compensation, while Jeff Bezos’ and Elon Musk’s space adventures occupy far more eyeballs on the TV news than the far more significant climate crisis. Everywhere the reader turns in Galloway’s book, there’s frightening news that promises to grow worse. In a supremely timely turn, for instance, he links mass murder—“a uniquely male crime” committed by “bored young men without any pathway to economic security”—to the general hopelessness of the era. Marriage rates are down, education for minority citizens lags far behind that for Whites, inequality grows, and wages continue to fall. All the points made by the author’s tables and graphs—“visuals that strike a chord and inspire action”—point to a maddeningly visible but unacted-on dissolution of the republic.
A dispiriting though deeply meaningful tour of bad-news numbers that mark a frightful national decline.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-54240-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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