Solid, sharp, articulate work—not just advertising for a possible 2024 presidential run.
The senior senator from Minnesota offers a thorough history of trustbusting in America and an urgent plea for stricter enforcement.
Klobuchar is on a mission to strengthen and enforce federal antitrust laws in order to halt the growing consolidation of big business, which thwarts competition and exacerbates economic inequality. This book, unlike her standard-issue political memoir, The Senator Next Door (2015), is both a diligently researched history lesson and a well thought out plan, meticulously delineated, to take on “corporate consolidation, Congressional inertia, and the conservative courts.” Showcasing her hardworking Midwestern roots, the author moves from her childhood in a Minneapolis suburb—her father wrote for the Star Tribune, and her paternal grandfather was a miner, a profession for which strong unions were crucial—to the initial growth of the Granger movement in response to grain price monopolies in the heartland. The first federal legislation was put forward by Ohio Sen. John Sherman in 1890, but it was not enforced until Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency and sought to dismantle the Northern Securities railroad monopoly, among many others. In 1911, Howard Taft broke up Standard Oil, thanks in large part to Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking exposé, which set the stage for the passage of more antitrust legislation—e.g., the Clayton Antitrust Act and Federal Trade Commission Act, both passed in 1914. Yet the progressive era gave way to war-caused fatigue and the reopening of certain legal loopholes. In addition to sketching the beliefs of the Chicago versus Harvard schools of thought on monopolies, Klobuchar examines key cases in the digital age (AT&T, Microsoft), alarming mergers in high tech and health care industries, and suits brought against Google and Facebook. The author also clearly shows how the previous administration’s pro-business stance led to significant reductions in important resources like antitrust lawyers. The final section, “The Path Forward,” is a staggeringly detailed, impressively documented and presented “list of the Top 25 recommendations to improve competition in our nation.”
Solid, sharp, articulate work—not just advertising for a possible 2024 presidential run.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65489-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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