Scattershot fearmongering.
An alarmist manifesto against big government, big tech, big finance, big education, and all the other putative enemies of the private purse.
“They are coming after your livelihood, aka your path to wealth,” writes Roth, author of The War on Small Business. Who are they? The “new financial world order,” which aims to make sure that you lose and “the wealthy and powerful” win. And how will this nefarious cabal pull it off? For one thing, by forcing such things as “mandatory vaccines and masking,” which of course are just plots to make government bigger. For another, by accruing debt that makes the dollar weaker and then ceding American hegemony in the global market, a process that began with the abandonment of the gold standard. You don’t even own the software on your cellphone and computer thanks to these evildoers, who have replaced plain per–mark version ownership with subscriptions. One day you won’t even own a car thanks to Uber and similar companies. Dare speak up, and you’ll wind up on some blacklist, such as a journalist banned from PayPal—though, Roth doesn’t add, the supposed journalist wasn’t shy of saying nice things about Hitler and often supporting radical right talking points—and the Canadian truckers who protested having to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to enter the U.S. In support of her various scarecrow theses, Roth adduces such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Peter Thiel, whose like-minded utterances are invariably “tremendous” or “fantastic.” Her targets are of the broad-side-of-the-barn variety: There’s Amazon, of course, which “wants to be entrenched in every facet of your life”; every institution of higher learning in the land, “cheered on by the useful idiots saying that you must go to college”; and, naturally, every company that has bought into the environmental, social, and corporate governance model.
Scattershot fearmongering.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304932
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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