Solid reporting combined with engaging stories—even about campaign finance reform.
A blistering account of concerted Republican efforts to quiet the political voices of minorities, students, and the poor.
Drawing on his work at MSNBC, where he is a national reporter, Roth debuts with a troubling overview of the many ways in which conservatives have worked to restrict voting, hamper campaign finance reform, and gerrymander Congress in the hope of undermining democracy. “Republican politicians and operatives, conservative lawyers, and grassroots activists,” writes the author, have been engaged in a “guerrilla effort to maintain a hold on power and fight off a progressive agenda” since President Barack Obama’s first election in 2008. They have done so out of a “profound skepticism about the consequences of democracy itself”—a serious belief that many citizens are uninformed, with little stake in their community, and that high-quality, civic-minded voters and corporations know what is best for society. Roth’s succinct, well-written report examines disparate events and rulings of the past decade, arguing that conservative efforts to thwart the popular will have gone beyond partisan politics and are dismissive of the democratic process. Since 2006, more than 20 states have created laws making it harder to vote (requiring voter IDs, cutting early voting, etc.). In key decisions, especially the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, “ushering in a flood of political money that threatens to warp American democracy beyond recognition.” At the local level, conservatives have blocked laws passed by progressive cities and counties that provide paid sick leave and improved wages for food service workers. The author also shows how judicial activism has used “constitutional minutiae” to limit the power of the people. Roth claims that distrust of universal suffrage has deep roots in American society, as evinced in the writings of individuals from historian Frances Parkman, who in 1878 said workmen and foreigners cared “nothing” for the public good, to conservative Samuel Huntington, who complained of an “excess of democracy” 100 years later.
Solid reporting combined with engaging stories—even about campaign finance reform.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90576-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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