An approachable yet scientifically rigorous look at what passes for political discourse in America.
A prominent political scientist asks why politicians and political advocates so often seem like “nasty, boorish sorts who somehow feel they need not obey the same social norms as ordinary citizens.”
Observing George W. Bush’s face on TV, Mutz (Political Science and Communication/Univ. of Penn.; Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy, 2006, etc.) realized that “[t]o obtain the same visual perspective in person, [one] would need to be either his lover or his dentist.” With ample humor and sufficient exposition for a lay audience, she conducts and analyzes a series of experiments carefully crafted to study how extreme close-ups and uncivil behavior in political TV affect the public discourse. Unsurprisingly, the results suggest that incivility erodes trust in government: “[U]ncivil political exchanges prime people to think about less savory, more strongly disliked examples of politicians and politics. This, in turn, prompts them to evaluate the whole enterprise more negatively.” Examining people’s political viewing habits, Mutz finds that “Republicans are exposed to fewer programs [than Democrats], a much larger proportion of which are uncivil.” (She does not make the connection that many Republican policies are themselves designed to limit the power and appeal of government, pointing to potential positive externalities of incivility for Republican actors.) Few of Mutz’s conclusions are surprising, and the most entertaining chapter is the last, in which she proffers an assortment of delightfully bizarre remedies to the fact that “[f]or most people, politics on its own merits is not sufficiently exciting…so it requires the drama and tension of uncivil human conflict to make it more interesting to watch.” Taking a page from the Korean networks, perhaps election coverage should involve “animations based on popular movies and sporting events to show who [is] surging ahead or falling behind,” or maybe candidates should compete on a season of Political Idol.
An approachable yet scientifically rigorous look at what passes for political discourse in America.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16511-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
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
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