A well-written and intriguing, if not always convincing, exploration of America’s political future.
A mathematician examines the ideal sizes for nations and the consequences of becoming too large.
“For nations,” this nonfiction book begins, “size matters.” Large nations, it argues, can spend more on militaries, manipulate economies, and spread the costs of public services across an extensive group of taxpayers. While these benefits are ubiquitous across huge, successful nations, there are a number of counterexamples throughout history of countries that became too big, as the more people a land encompasses, “the more potential for conflict.” To Lockwood, given the societal tensions that have plagued America for the past two decades, the United States may be on that path. A former faculty member of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, he is the author of multiple books that examine complex social phenomena through mathematical analysis. This study follows that tradition. In dissecting post–World War II case studies, it examines categories such as the cost of national defense, free trade, and income inequality to quantify the ideal size for a nation. Drawing on examples of “rightsizing” from European empires that decolonized or nations that partitioned (such as India and Pakistan), Lockwood explores “the trade-offs between size and consensus.” He evaluates the various “rightsizing” strategies, such as partition, annexation, and decentralization. As painful as these options may be, the author argues, they are superior to the alternative approach whereby the central government takes a more authoritarian turn in defending national wealth (models pursued, for instance, by Russia and China). Backed by impressive research that includes a 12-page bibliography and more than 280 endnotes, this book makes an effective abstract case for the idyllic size of a theoretical nation. Lockwood breaks down a complex analysis into accessible prose designed for a general readership. Yet when this formula is applied to the U.S., the volume’s preference for a “peaceful divorce” over a “forced union” will make many readers uncomfortable in its echoing of far-right fringe rhetoric. Decentralization is one thing, but a national divorce opens a myriad of logistical impracticalities that are left unaddressed in the work’s assessment.
A well-written and intriguing, if not always convincing, exploration of America’s political future.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781632996336
Page Count: 198
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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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