Admonitory, cautionary, and essential.
An examination of our fall into the economic pit crafted by Amazon, Google, et al.—and ideas for how to crawl out.
Lynn, the founder and CEO of the Open Markets Institute, pulls few punches in his grim analysis of the current enormous economic sway exercised by monopolies. The author laments the loss of a bright American past when people owned stores (not franchises), farms, and other enterprises now controlled by global corporations bound by few restrictions. Lynn, who has published two other books on this subject, including Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010), provides the historical contexts for his positions and offers a wide array of discussion on the influential thinking (good and bad) of men including Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Bork, and countless others. Though liberal, Lynn does not hesitate to criticize Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders who failed to do anything about the economic threats posed by Walmart, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other behemoths. He also places a chunk of blame on Ronald Reagan—who had a significant role in “overthrowing America’s traditional system of capitalism”—and his Republican successors, especially Donald Trump, whose presidency “has been an almost flawless catastrophe.” The author’s solid foundation of reading and research backs up his sage analysis. He seems to have read every relevant essay and book on the subject and has extracted the passages that best illuminate his points. Lynn worries that we have little time for remedies, which require legislative as well as judicial action. He ends with a warning and an exhortation: “Do nothing and our world ends....We have but one way forward. Only the American System of Liberty provides us with the intellectual, institutional, psychological, technological, and spiritual tools that will enable us to break the powers that bind us and to build a world fit for our children and their children.
Admonitory, cautionary, and essential.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24062-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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