A richly documented political book with significant current relevance.
An exploration of the relentless actions of the right-wing movement seeking to counter the collective voice of the majority.
With the 2024 election looming and democracy's fate potentially at stake, Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot (2015), traces the deliberate efforts of extreme right-wing conservatives over recent decades to limit control of the country's majority interests to maintain Republican dominance. This trend began with Pat Buchanan's 1992 White House bid. As Berman notes, Buchanan’s “nativism, racism, and skepticism toward democracy foreshadowed the ideology that now defines the Republican Party.” The author highlights subsequent underhanded policies by polarizing figures like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who suppressed voting rights, and Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach, who instituted high-profile anti-immigration policies. These actions fall in line with the strategy of Donald Trump and his allies, who actively engage in voter suppression, district manipulation, judicial influence, and historical whitewashing—and all are backed by substantial funding from billionaire donors. In consistently insightful prose, Berman delves into the Constitution's founding intentions, emphasizing its design for a system of checks and balances, and he shows how institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate, with two senators per state regardless of population, can be leveraged to undermine the true will of the people. One of the most telling examples is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin's outsize influence on national politics. Despite these challenges, Berman highlights recent grassroots victories and underscores the potency of state initiatives in countering extremist right-wing threats and preserving a hope for American democracy. “State constitutions empower popular majorities in ways that the federal constitution does not,” he writes. “They were specifically designed to be a majoritarian counterweight to the countermajoritarian features of America’s political institutions.”
A richly documented political book with significant current relevance.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780374600211
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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