A tongue-in-cheek yet often perceptive glimpse into modern political campaigns.
Two teachers recount launching a misguided run for Congress in this campaign memoir.
“We were two average, apathetic, everyday Americans, finally driven off our respective couches by a desire to get involved and make a difference,” writes Hamrick in the book’s introduction. In this story of idealistic naïveté, readers get an insider’s perspective on Allen’s 2018 run for Congress in Texas’ 24th district and Hamrick’s efforts as campaign manager. While downplaying their connections to the suburban Dallas community they sought to represent, both Allen and Hamrick were award-winning, beloved teachers when they first launched their Democratic primary campaign. Full of level-headed, compassionate ideas that challenge the brash, reactionary tenor of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, the duo emphasizes the drudgery of 21st-century political campaigns. Written in a fast-paced, witty style reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin (except, in this story, the good guys lose), Allen and Hamrick’s account blends side-splitting anecdotes, ample cursing, and campaign disenchantment into a timely snapshot of contemporary politics. Frequently self-deprecating, the authors juxtapose Texas’ “organized, efficient, and mobilized” Republican Party, buoyed by a team of young suburbanites, with the state’s Democratic machine, which they liken to the Titanic, “post-iceberg, sinking into freezing waters while panic and chaos erupted around us.” Allen would lose the primary to perennial Democratic candidate Jan McDowell, though not for lack of trying. On one occasion, after a day of grueling campaigning, Allen discovered that he had shredded the rubber soles of his shoes. While the work’s narrative casts itself as a “buddy comedy,” whose sarcastic style may grate on the more academic readers focused solely on political insights, the authors skillfully offer pragmatic advice for would-be politicians. In primaries, for instance, where a candidate may agree with his opponent on most issues, what matters is not the “substance of what you say, but how you say it.” While an implicit indictment of the political system, the engaging book is rarely bitter and maintains a tinge of the earnest idealism that drove Allen’s campaign in the first place.
A tongue-in-cheek yet often perceptive glimpse into modern political campaigns.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780875658858
Page Count: 318
Publisher: TCU Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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