A chilling intimation of the growing entrenchment of partisan politics.
An alarming study of the GOP’s redrawing of the American political map across the country.
According to Salon editor-in-chief Daley, while Democrats were celebrating President Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, they took their eyes off the important state legislatures, especially in key swing states. Subsequently, the defeated Republicans were already hatching nefarious plans to turn the “disaster into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 census.” According to law, every state redraws its district lines every 10 years, after the census. Both parties use gerrymandering—named after Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who redrew a state Senate map in 1812 so skewed it looked like a salamander—to their advantage, but with wildly more sophisticated mapping abilities, gerrymandering has become a “more lethal weapon.” Republican strategists initiated the Republican State Leadership Committee in order to raise millions of dollars for the Redistricting Majority Project, REDMAP, which would indicate where the money should be spent in order to bolster Republican candidates in Democratic-controlled state legislatures from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Michigan to Wisconsin, flip control of the chamber, lock in redistricting, and thus control Congress for the next decade. This political “dirty deed done dirt cheap” is called “ratfucking,” as designated by Edmund Wilson in the 1920s and used by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. Indeed, this is just what happened after the midterm election of 2010, as the GOP captured 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 680 new seats in the state legislatures. Daley takes on each significant state race in turn and notes that despite the country’s pulling more center-left on many issues, the far right is going to be calling the shots until 2020. The author looks at the masterminds behind the strategy and the mapmaking technology as well as the roles of restrictive voting rights laws, “dark money,” and voter turnout.
A chilling intimation of the growing entrenchment of partisan politics.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-162-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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