A thin, uneven recounting of a long congressional career.
In her debut, Williams offers a brief overview of the personal and professional life of her cousin, the long-serving Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan.
Conyers is the second most senior member of U.S. House of Representatives, one of the 13 founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, onetime chairman of both the House Committee on Government Operations (now Committee on Oversight and Government Reform) and current ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary. The congressman was born in northwest Detroit and has served its congressional district since 1965. This extremely condensed biography begins with a cursory narrative of Conyers’ early life, including his father’s United Auto Workers affiliation; Conyers’ early dedication to music, especially jazz; his exposure to the 1943 Detroit Race Riot; his union, military and university experience; and his marriage. The book then depicts Conyers’ introduction to law and lawmaking, noting his formative work with Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.—the only sitting House member senior to Conyers—and providing short paragraphs and lists of Conyers’ hallmark projects, key issues and legislation. Other chapters touch on Conyers’ staunch Democratic politics and his anti-Nixon and anti-Reagan positions, as well as his diverse accomplishments including cosponsoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965, serving on the Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal and fighting music piracy. Unfortunately, this brief, disjointed book fails to provide a cogent, linear illustration of Conyers’ career owing to its lack of contextualizing information, supportive data or critical analysis. The most readable, endearing section of the book describes Conyers’ friendship and partnership with Rosa Parks, who worked in the congressman’s office from 1965 until her retirement in 1988, but even here detail is sparse. The book’s only direct quotes from the author’s cousin come from Conyers’ speeches and printed works.
A thin, uneven recounting of a long congressional career.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2012
ISBN: 9781475294569
Page Count: 36
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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