An astute and maddening account of a broken institution and, in turn, a broken democracy.
Provocative portrait of a dysfunctional—by design, it seems—U.S. Senate.
The Senate has been in a long state of decline, writes Jentleson, public affairs director at Democracy Forward and former deputy chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid. That fall was “set in motion by senators themselves, who found that suffocating the institution with genteel gridlock served their interests,” especially during Jim Crow, when obstructionism was a handy technique for blocking civil rights legislation. However, when Jentleson arrived at the Senate, those tools “had come to be applied to all Senate business.” Don’t like a piece of impending legislation? Invoke the filibuster, which was not meant to be used by the Senate in the first place—and particularly not as Mitch McConnell and company have honed it down to be, so that the stand-your-ground-and-jabber filibuster of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has been replaced by one in which a senator doesn’t even have to be present on the floor. By this means, along with advancing requirements for supermajorities when simple majority rule ought to hold, the Senate of the last 20 years has managed to avoid accomplishing almost anything—and the minority is definitely in charge, as it was in 2009, when Senate Republicans represented only 35% of the U.S. population. “The most fundamental characteristic of democracy—the idea that majority rule is the fairest way to decide the outcome of elections and determine which bills become law—is baked into our founding ideas and texts,” argues Jentleson, but that’s not the way it works, and that explains the continuing stranglehold of McConnell—whose major legislative achievement seems to have been to define corruption as requiring “only a direct, quid pro quo exchange”—even now that he’s no longer the majority leader. The author proposes reforms, but given all he’s outlined here, they seem unlikely ever to be heard.
An astute and maddening account of a broken institution and, in turn, a broken democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-777-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
