Gopnik’s learned, lofty, occasionally dense study ultimately reasserts the belief in the “infinity of small effects.”
The longtime New Yorker staff writer and prolific cultural critic once again shows his astute awareness of the public’s political consciousness in this new work championing “liberalism.”
In this “distillation and…reduction” of previous essays from the New Yorker over the past 20 years and “a long lifetime’s reading of philosophy, history, and biography,” Gopnik (At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York, 2017, etc.) gathers together biographies of and theories from a wide variety of subjects, including Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Disraeli, and James Boswell, in order to define liberalism and clarify its purpose through the ages. Over the course of four discursive chapters, the author demonstrates how these struggles contribute to humanity’s incremental improvement: “those thousand small sanities…moving us bit by bit a little bit closer toward the modern Arcadia.” Gopnik frames the narrative around a conversation he had on the night of the 2016 U.S. presidential election with his 17-year-old daughter (“A Long Walk with a Smart Daughter”), whom he consoled by explaining why the liberal values her parents brought her up with were “not just some family legacy of attitudes…but ideals that were made reliable by experience and proven true by history.” In the “The Rhinoceros Manifesto: What Is Liberalism?” the author shows how the passionate and egalitarian 1850s love affair between John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor helped forge one of the first documents on liberalism (Mill’s On Liberty). In subsequent chapters, Gopnik examines why the political right hates liberalism—e.g., prizing reason over cultural values, nonbelief in reform—and why the left hates liberalism (the need to be revolutionary). Essentially, the author’s “adventure” is not a defense of liberalism as much as a clarification and pieces of fatherly advice for a new generation on liberal reforms and institutions.
Gopnik’s learned, lofty, occasionally dense study ultimately reasserts the belief in the “infinity of small effects.”Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-9936-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.
The nameless resister inside the White House speaks.
“The character of one man has widened the chasms of American political division,” writes Anonymous. Indeed. The Trump years will not be remembered well—not by voters, not by history since the man in charge “couldn’t focus on governing, and he was prone to abuses of power, from ill-conceived schemes to punish his political rivals to a propensity for undermining vital American institutions.” Given all that, writes the author, and given Trump’s bizarre behavior and well-known grudges—e.g., he ordered that federal flags be raised to full staff only a day after John McCain died, an act that insiders warned him would be construed as petty—it was only patriotic to try to save the country from the man even as the resistance movement within the West Wing simultaneously tried to save Trump’s presidency. However, that they tried did not mean they succeeded: The warning of the title consists in large part of an extended observation that Trump has removed the very people most capable of guiding him to correct action, and the “reasonable professionals” are becoming ever fewer in the absence of John Kelly and others. So unwilling are those professionals to taint their reputations by serving Trump, in fact, that many critical government posts are filled by “acting” secretaries, directors, and so forth. And those insiders abetting Trump are shrinking in number even as Trump stumbles from point to point, declaring victory over the Islamic State group (“People are going to fucking die because of this,” said one top aide) and denouncing the legitimacy of the process that is now grinding toward impeachment. However, writes the author, removal from office is not the answer, not least because Trump may not leave without trying to stir up a civil war. Voting him out is the only solution, writes Anonymous; meanwhile, we’re stuck with a president whose acts, by the resisters’ reckoning, are equal parts stupid, illegal, or impossible to enact.
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1846-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
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