Required reading for electoral handicappers, polling bookies and other political junkies.
American politics is nasty, ugly, messy and divisive—and that’s just the way it should be.
RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Trende, frequently heard on the seemingly contradictory avenues of Fox News, CNN and NPR, allows that the current scene looks especially chaotic, but adds, “the type of instability we’ve witnessed recently is really the rule in American politics, whereas extended dominance of either the presidency or the House is the exception.” Thus the often-mooted predictions, usually just after an election, that one of the major parties is headed for extinction or permanent minority status is usually wrong—and though Trende doesn’t adequately allow for the possibility of gerrymandering or poll fixing, we should hope that he’s right. Voter coalitions are similarly fragile, he writes; they tend to cluster around issues, and once the issue is addressed or forgotten the coalition tends to disintegrate. That some coalitions have been killed deliberately is another matter. The author examines the slow but steady expulsion of Southern conservatives out of the ranks of the Democratic Party during the FDR administration, which he calls “a feature of the New Deal, not a bug.” Without being blatant about it, he also examines the rightward tilt of the current GOP in that light. FDR eventually had to re-recruit the Southerners; the question remains whether the GOP will have to seek out moderates to fill its tent, given the fact that in the last election the “Republicans nominated several candidates who were too stridently conservative for their states and districts, even in 2010.” The big news in the book is Trende’s observation that the Obama victory of 2008 drew on the narrowest reading of the broad-based coalition that Bill Clinton assembled in the early 1990s, and the steady withering of his base may prove harmful in 2012. Nonetheless, writes the author, “[t]his book offers no sexy prediction about what will happen next in American politics,” but instead a smart look at just how predictably unpredictable the electorate has proven to be.
Required reading for electoral handicappers, polling bookies and other political junkies.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-11646-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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