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
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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