A lively overview of a woman working to shape the nation's future.
As part of their Queens of the Resistance series, Jones and Trotman offer an admiring look at the unexpected political career of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), a “trailblazer” who won election to Congress in 2018 representing New York’s 14th District.
“I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny,” Ocasio-Cortez says, referring to the Parkchester neighborhood where her father, an architect, and Puerto Rican–born mother had settled. When she was young, the family moved to Yorktown Heights, in Westchester, so she and her brother could attend better schools, and the young Alexandria found herself a minority among nearly all-white classmates. Excelling in science, she set her sights on a career in medicine, majoring in pre-med at Boston University. But after a semester abroad in Niger, where she witnessed shocking poverty, she changed her major to economics and international relations and later took an internship with Ted Kennedy, which served as “her first real-life brush with national politics.” Participating in a protest against a proposed oil pipeline at Standing Rock proved “spiritually transformative,” she said. That fight against government and corporate forces taught her a lesson about change, and she gravitated to Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president in 2016. The progressive organizations Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats tapped her to run against longtime representative Joe Crowley in the 2018 midterms. Her Puerto Rican heritage and working-class experience (cleaning homes, tending bar) earned voters’ respect, and, to her astonishment, she won. Ocasio-Cortez quickly took the spotlight, promoting the Green New Deal and speaking out about racial, economic, and immigration injustices. “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” she believes. “Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.”
A lively overview of a woman working to shape the nation's future.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18985-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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