A clear and informative history with limited appeal for nonspecialists.
If democracy seems imperiled, don’t blame only cable news and social media. Two media experts argue that it has always lurched from crisis to crisis.
Gershberg, a journalism and media studies professor, and Illing, a Vox reporter and podcaster, challenge the idea that the linchpin of democracy is a set of rules or institutions, such as safeguards for free elections or laws that protect civil rights. In this dense history of the intersection of politics, democracy, and free expression, the authors argue that “the essential democratic freedom” is freedom of expression. That freedom leads to “the paradox of democracy”—“a free and open communication environment…because of its openness, invites exploitation and subversion from within.” Fascists like Mussolini and injustices like Jim Crow laws arise because open communication allows people to persuade others to support their aims, and it’s been that way for millennia. In ancient Athens, Socrates’ death sentence was “democracy’s original sin”: A city known for free speech condemned a philosopher for speaking freely. Moving chronologically through the centuries, Gershberg and Illing show how their “paradox” has played out in movements that include the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the rise and fall of local newspapers, the ascent of cable news and social media, and the eruption of the “cancel culture.” Viewing democracy as inherently messy, the authors offer no global blueprint for fixing the chaos, and their few suggestions are overfamiliar, including their call for “the restoration of local journalism, especially print newspapers.” A flat narrative also works against their worthwhile material: The authors don’t develop or expand their thesis so much as elaborate on the same paradox, again and again, and how it informed successive eras. The result is a book that provides valuable context for the latest assaults on democracy but one that, with a more effective structure, could have reached a general readership.
A clear and informative history with limited appeal for nonspecialists.Pub Date: June 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-68170-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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
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SEEN & HEARD
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