Astute examination of a stymied system.
A veteran reporter explains the loss of compromise in contemporary American politics.
Los Angeles Times national correspondent Brownstein writes proficiently about the Red/Blue divide, demonstrating how it plays out not so much among voters as in the halls of Congress, where partisanship has virtually destroyed cooperation between Republicans and Democrats. Ignore the overzealous title: There is no civil war, but rather a “dangerous impasse,” as the author writes, where party loyalty and ideology now prevent efficient government action on pressing national issues from health care to immigration. Brownstein provides much-needed perspective by examining the history of modern American politicking, from the four highly partisan decades beginning with the 1896 McKinley-Bryan election to the “golden age” of cooperation in Congress extending from the presidential administrations of FDR to Lyndon Johnson, when politicians were less polarized. Politics became more combative from 1964 to 1990, writes the author, as rising special-interest groups of the Left and Right gradually helped form the Democratic and Republican party “bases,” and Congressional floor debates filled with rhetoric aimed at TV audiences. At the same time, cultural values replaced class as the focus of national politics. The GOP became the party of culturally traditional, churchgoing suburban Americans, and the Democrats attracted primarily singles, seculars, homosexuals, nonwhites and others more comfortable with urban diversity. The Republican strategy under President George W. Bush has exploited and deepened these differences, says Brownstein, fostering a hyper-partisan system that rewards party discipline and discourages compromise. The author traces the roles of the media, lobbyists and other factors, and argues for reforms—restoring the Fairness Doctrine, for example—to create a less confrontational politics of consensus. For all their disagreements, notes the author, voters are less polarized than Washington politicos and would welcome national leadership that reconciles, unites and gets things done.
Astute examination of a stymied system.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59420-139-4
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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