Essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the Trumpian maelstrom.
A close look at the ultra-rightist Project 2025, now playing in a capital near you.
Atlantic staffer Graham dubs the authors of the Heritage Foundation–funded Project 2025 “contrarians,” but they’re more than that: They believe “that the only way to deliver the Christian, right-wing nation they desired was a carefully organized assault on the U.S. government as it existed.” That radical assault has four chief aims: to restore the man-headed family, dismantle the “administrative state,” close the border and defend the nation’s sovereignty, and “secure our God-given individual rights to live freely.” Trump claimed not to have heard of Project 2025 and its playbook, but as Russell Vought, an author of the platform who’s now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, proudly acknowledged, he and his Heritage cohort were busily writing executive orders long ago, a stack of them awaiting Trump in his first minutes in the Oval Office. Vought also proudly owns up to being a Christian nationalist: “We are people who believe that we have a Christian nation.” Project 2025 is to be carried out, as has been plain, by seizing control of agencies and placing them under the rule of loyalists who will put Trump’s policies into action, with the understanding that “although the president’s choices for high-profile positions might not be the most qualified picks, the ranks below them would be stocked with well-prepared and committed deputies.” With broad planks restoring discriminatory measures against minorities, nonbinary citizens, and the like and slashing social services, Project 2025 also aims to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive consumption tax that would fall heavily on the poor. In fact, as Graham makes clear in his close reading of the text, the intended beneficiaries are wealthy white fellow travelers, and no others need apply.
Essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the Trumpian maelstrom.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798217153725
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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