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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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