A persuasive, optimistic case for a future shaped by independent voters.
A political analyst surveys the rise and future of independents in American politics.
“Are we trapped in a partisan doom loop?” Brandon asks in his opening chapter, lamenting how politicians of both parties turn “politics into an endless existential crisis.” Much of the book’s first half paints a harrowing portrait of contemporary politics as the author surveys the ways in which hyper-partisanship—fueled by grifters on both sides of the ideological spectrum and vast amounts of political donations, per Brandon—has exerted a stranglehold on Congress that prevents bipartisan cooperation on the most basic of issues, even those that have significant support among average citizens. Still, the author argues that, for the 45% of Americans who identify as independent, there’s a glimmer of hope for the country’s political future. Backed by a convincing array of both quantitative and qualitative data, Brandon posits the counterintuitive notion that the most salient division in contemporary America is not an ideological split between conservatives and liberals but rather the generational divide between baby boomers (who currently dominate political offices) and millennials and generation Z. The author observes that younger voters “realize the state of politics today isn’t sustainable” and are the most likely to embrace a new political milieu that defies the boomer politics that have shaped America over the last three decades. Brandon also endorses pragmatic reforms, such as open primaries and ranked-choice voting, that disincentivize politicians from embracing extremes. This is a well-researched work supported by more than 160 endnotes—the author balances the book’s academic underpinnings with an accessible, often conversational, writing style, and the text is supplemented by a plethora of graphs and other visual elements. While Brandon is openly critical of both parties, the book features an introduction written by Ed Crane, the co-founder of the libertarian/conservative Cato Institute, and an afterword by former Republican congressman Ken Buck. The author is the former leader of the libertarian think tank FreedomWorks, and he promotes an approach to reform that includes broad criticisms of unions and the federal government.
A persuasive, optimistic case for a future shaped by independent voters.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798891383692
Page Count: 208
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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