A vigorous analysis of contemporary politics.
How talk radio evolved from informative discussions of local issues to a forum for outrage.
Rosenwald (Senior Fellow/Robert A. Fox Leadership Program, Univ. of Pennsylvania), the co-editor-in-chief of “Made by History,” the Washington Post’s daily history section, makes his book debut with a brisk, well-researched history of the rise and transformation of talk radio. Because FM radio, with its stereo signal, carried more music, beginning in the 1960s, AM’s share of the listener audience plummeted—and with it, ad revenue. Station owners, in financial straits, saw in the news talk format a way to build popularity. Advice shows, interviews, and caller-driven discussions of topics relevant to local listeners appealed to Americans yearning for connection and community. In talk shows, listeners found “a virtual replacement for the front stoop, through which they could discuss current affairs with people like themselves.” Although now identified with conservative political views, as recently as the 1980s, talk radio “was diverse in topics and political orientations.” The debut of Rush Limbaugh, in 1988, changed the tenor of talk shows dramatically. Like his listeners, Limbaugh was dissatisfied with the liberal stance of mainstream media. “I validate what millions of Americans already think,” he claimed. Outspoken and hard-hitting, Limbaugh, along with other hosts, “flaunted opposition to political correctness and sneered at the new norms promoted by the rights movements that inflamed conservative sensibilities.” While the hosts did not limit their guests strictly to Republicans, Democrats—Bill Clinton excepted—found talk radio “an awkward fit.” Able to simplify “even complicated, highly technical matters into something understandable and ominous,” talk radio hosts influenced voters. In the 1994 election, Republican leaders credited Limbaugh with the party’s victory. With the advent of Fox News, the “content, style, and verve of talk radio” moved to cable, creating a forum for “pugnacious,” right-wing personalities who “pushed for unfiltered, ideologically extreme candidates and a party shaped in their image.”
A vigorous analysis of contemporary politics.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-674-18501-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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