A concise and prudent discussion of the nation’s bitter political contentions.
Paepke, a former practicing attorney, examines divisiveness and political dysfunction in the United States and proposes a plan for moving forward in this nonfiction work.
The author observes that, contrary to popular belief, the ideological polarization that currently beleaguers the United States is not the historical norm; in fact, following World War II, the country leapt “from strength to strength,” and, despite genuine political disagreement, reasonable compromises and consensus among citizens were concretely brokered. However, this is no longer the case—today, the least temperate members of the citizenry elect the least moderate politicians, and deeply divisive figures like Donald Trump and Joe Biden continue to win nominations for the presidency despite their lack of general support. Paepke asserts that this state of affairs has been engendered in part by an irresponsible media that intentionally stokes the flames of political acrimony and by a presidential primary nomination process designed to prefer voters “louder, angrier, and more extreme than mainstream Americans.” The result, in his estimation, has been a loss of shared national identity and purpose. “This extreme political climate has overflowed into broader society and everyday life. The shared sense of community has declined. Americans increasingly choose their states, their neighborhoods, their social lives, and their friends based on political compatibility. The choice of news and information sources too often becomes a definitive pledge of allegiance.” With great clarity and analytical meticulousness, Paepke sketches a sober, centrist political platform—which would seem to have broad appeal among voters—including positions on crime, climate control, and foreign policy. The author offers much more than a lament; he foresees a future in which widespread discontent is channeled into substantive political action and recommends that either the nomination process be radically revised or that the primaries be bypassed altogether by a presidential candidate independent of the two main parties. Paepke’s important and hopeful contribution is an impressive example of what he preaches: a common-sense pragmatism that earnestly seeks out centrist compromise.
A concise and prudent discussion of the nation’s bitter political contentions.Pub Date: June 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781637557419
Page Count: 190
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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