Liberal-minded students of politics will find West’s arguments persuasive and his case well presented.
A think-tanker’s view of the post-Trumpian rubble.
“The United States faces extraordinary problems of polarization, extremism, and radicalization, which make it difficult to safeguard our democratic system and deal with important policy issues.” So writes West, vice president of the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution. Sadly, there’s nothing novel about this observation, but the author is well equipped to observe from his position, where a battery of political scientists studies events and trends. Naturally, they are dismissed and loathed by the MAGA crowd and its allied media. When one Brookings fellow identified the chief culprit as Trump and the authoritarian cult of personality he had built around himself, right-wingers howled even as some of West’s longtime friends on the right “complained about the capital city’s ‘cockroaches’ and said it was time to use the popular bug-killer Raid to get rid of political adversaries.” It all makes for a dangerous moment indeed, requiring long-needed reforms: among many others, abolishing the “antiquated Electoral College,” stopping gerrymandering, and quashing campaign finance rules that privilege the haves over the have-nots. Moreover, West suggests, many institutions in civil society, such as universities, must be overhauled in order to remove dark money. The author attempts to be evenhanded, noting that social media amplifies misinformation by both left and right even as the loudest voices emanate from the right. He also calls for self-policing that falls short of self-censorship, while stronger matters (here he recalls Leon Wieseltier) face a hitherto unexplored “challenge of delivering justice to those with complaints while also protecting the procedural rights of the accused.” Overall, West’s prescriptions are reasonable, but given a time when gerrymandering, fascism, and extreme partisanship are some of the defining features of the political landscapes, most seem unlikely to be enacted.
Liberal-minded students of politics will find West’s arguments persuasive and his case well presented.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8157-3959-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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