The book has little news for anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s a useful overview all the same.
A legal scholar examines disinformation as a go-to in the authoritarian toolbox.
Disinformation is ubiquitous and often laughably transparent, as when Trump brays about the 2020 election, but it works. As McQuade notes, two-thirds of Republicans believe that “the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true…and that violence is a legitimate response.” The Jan. 6 insurrection may just have been a practice run, but meanwhile the disinformation flows, abetted by election deniers who have been busily taking over state and local GOP branches and becoming overseers of future elections. McQuade examines several aspects of the playbook. One longtime Trump ploy is to paint his opponents with idiotic epithets such as “Sleepy Joe” and “Ron DeSanctimonious,” which “seem juvenile, but they serve the same manipulative purpose as other forms of disinformation.” The author doesn’t spare the media, which, she argues, has exaggerated its watchdog role to assume that government malfeasance and corruption are more widespread than the facts warrant, constantly hunting for the next scandal. Disinformation is a Clausewitzian war by other means, a way of dominating and diminishing opponents without violence, and it relies on constant lying. The current GOP dogma, for example, is not just that Trump won in 2020, but also that we live in a republic and not a democracy that demands that our leaders should make decisions for us, “providing cover for far-right values that are not shared by the majority of Americans.” McQuade’s handbook doesn’t add much to the literature on disinformation, but as a national security prosecutor, she’s well placed to liken what’s going on now to al-Qaeda’s mastery of digital media “to recruit and radicalize members with propaganda”—a thought guaranteed to trouble one’s sleep.
The book has little news for anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s a useful overview all the same.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781644213636
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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