By practicing the basic journalistic acts of listening and observing, Macy continues her noble work as a truth teller.
A small-town success story returns to her Ohio home to take account of profound changes.
“It’s not as if Urbana had ever been utopia for me. I was among the poorest kids in my class, and I felt it.” Macy, the author of Dopesick and other bestsellers, made her way out of poverty in the 1980s through a college degree funded by grants that largely no longer exist. Her latest nonfiction narrative chronicles her return home to try to see what would happen to a kid like her today, coming face to face with “the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place.” Her reporting goes deep and wide, including her family members, old friends and teachers, and many new acquaintances. Central among them is recent high school graduate Silas James, one of the teens she identifies as “a modern-day me,” though Silas is trans and has more abuse and trauma in his background than the author. Also memorable are an ex-boyfriend, once the most liberal person she knew, now a strident voice on an array of far-right talking points; on the other end of the spectrum is Brooke Perry, a deeply committed attendance officer whom she accompanies on harrowing rounds to try to get kids into school in a climate where education has lost its place as a tentpole of the American dream. The author does not shy away from tough personal stories, writing about a niece who was abused as a child by her stepfather. Macy goes into the toughest interviews with “trauma-informed advice,” reminding herself that connecting about shared interests and noncontroversial topics will keep these conversations going much longer—though sadly, it often doesn’t change the end result. Black-and-white photos of the interview subjects add an important dimension to the story.
By practicing the basic journalistic acts of listening and observing, Macy continues her noble work as a truth teller.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780593656730
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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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