With the midterm elections looming, this detailed study of how campaigns work shines valuable light into dark corners.
A study of the secret machinery of politics that interprets the polls, creates the advertisements, and advises the candidates.
Sociology professor Laurison, who worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, draws on interviews with the well-paid professionals (all pseudonymous) of a shadowy business. The author strikes a fairly even balance between Democrats and Republicans. Nearly all are White, college-educated, and from well-off families—a long way from the composition of the national polity. While most genuinely believe that a victory for their favored candidate will make the country better, they often see voters as passive players to be subdivided by various traits and manipulated for their votes, mostly via data. They see the candidate as a bundle of positive and negative characteristics whose main roles are to shake hands, raise money, and give tailored speeches. Working on a campaign is a grueling, exhausting job. Laurison asks, are they effective? Even successful politicos acknowledge that a great deal is out of their hands, determined by the broader environment and thematic issues. The author cites convincing research to show that campaign advertising, for example, does not do much, and voter attitudes are very difficult to change. One of the few campaign activities that seems to make a difference is grassroots contact, especially useful in reaching disinterested voters. But volunteer-based fieldwork is an area that professionals largely disregard. Laurison’s conclusions are interesting, but his own views occasionally distract from his reasoned analysis. Because he clearly loathes Trump and dislikes those who support him, he offers little examination of his 2016 campaign. If nothing else, Trump’s tactics—as dirty as they were—serve as intriguing examples of a successful insurgency campaign. Nevertheless, Laurison makes many important points about how politics reached its current state and where it might go from here.
With the midterm elections looming, this detailed study of how campaigns work shines valuable light into dark corners.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2506-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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