Though conservative readers may part ways with the author, even they may be interested in the cogent analysis she provides.
A philosophy professor attempts a cooler approach to divisive political questions.
In chapters with intriguing titles like "Can You Be Racist to a White Person?" "Is It Sexist To Say Men Are Trash?" and "Has Political Correctness Gone Too Far?” Shahvisi attempts not "to be ‘objective’ or ‘apolitical,’ if such a thing were even possible," but to "make my reasoning clear enough that those who disagree with me will at least see where we part ways." For example, the cases she examines to explore the possibility of reverse racism include Abigail Fisher, aka "Becky With the Bad Grades," who felt that her rejection by the University of Texas was racist because less qualified students of color were admitted; and Amy Cooper, the Central Park dog walker who became one of the original "Karens" when she called the police on a Black man who had asked her to leash her dog. The chapter also examines the possibility of sexism against men and ageism against baby boomers. In this case, as in just about all, Shahvisi finds that the real problem is capitalism. "While power and material resources continue to be distributed as they are, there can be no such thing as 'reverse-oppression.’ ” If steam is pouring from your ears right now, you probably aren't going to like her answer to the question, "Do All Lives Matter?" but the path to it is instructive. She identifies three different types of objections to the assertion that Black lives matter, calling them the color-blind response, the “whataboutery” response, and the white supremacist response, breaking each down to discover the assumptions it rests on. Particularly interesting chapters analyze "splaining" of all kinds and investigate the question of whether we should #BelieveWomen, especially considering the ironic statistic that 61% of women report lying. Why? “To get out of having unwanted sex.”
Though conservative readers may part ways with the author, even they may be interested in the cogent analysis she provides.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780143136835
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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