A provocative investigation into the American political divide.
A study of the rise of political partisanship in the United States, coupled with an impassioned call for a rebirth of the democratic virtue of compromise.
The polarization of American politics is widely accepted as a baleful development, although no solid consensus has emerged regarding its genesis. In this third installment of his series, Paepke (The Seinfeld Election II, 2017, etc.) contends that a complex combination of forces—institutional, political, and social—has resulted in a lack of moderate, centrist elected officials, as well as voters that once demanded them. First, he points out that the electorate itself has become thoroughly factionalized. Hence, national elections have been replaced by contests between relentlessly partisan states, a predicament that’s only exacerbated by the Electoral College. Consequently, congressional incumbency rates have risen sharply, he says, and safe seats are predictably decided in primaries, which cater to a minority of extremists. Presidential elections, Paepke notes, are decided by these same partisan states, so candidates are incentivized to avoid substantive national issues. This produces one-sided legislation with an expiration date, because as soon as the next party takes power, it eviscerates its predecessor’s legislative gains. Paepke not only astutely diagnoses systemic problems, but also makes a stirring case for compromise as the core of democracy, while “Autocrats decree as they please, consulting only their own values, pleasures, and conscience.” The author’s analysis is, in itself, an admirable expression of the intellectual temperance he recommends; for example, he discusses the corrosive ways in which Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both worsened the problem, despite their respective promises to unify a fractured nation. Paepke doesn’t present much in the way of concrete solutions, and he predicts that President Donald Trump will only offer more of the same. Nonetheless, in an age of dogmatic attachments, such an open-minded and deep reflection is itself a source of hope.
A provocative investigation into the American political divide.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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