Bedside reading for Karl Rove wannabes preparing for 2008.
Why have recent US national elections been so close? It’s the regions, stupid.
In an analysis of election data and exit polls of the past five decades, political scientists Earl (Political Science/Rice Univ.) and Merle (Politics and Government/Emory Univ.), twin brothers and coauthors (The Rise of Southern Republicans, 2003, etc.), show that the Democrats and Republicans are now evenly balanced in the national electorate, each having two regional strongholds and battling for voters in the ten-state Midwest swing region. The authors note that this development may be traced back to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ended a Democratic advantage among white voters dating to the New Deal. Reagan realigned white voters, with conservative whites going to the Republicans (now redefined as a conservative party emphasizing national security, economic growth, lower taxes and traditional positions on cultural and religious matters) and liberal whites increasingly joining the Democrats. It was the beginning of the end of the party factions once known as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Trends continued gradually, and by 2004, the parties were more polarized than ever, with Republicans now drawing their strength from the South and Mountains/Plains states, the Democrats from the Northeast and Pacific Coast. These sharp regional differences now drive American politics, say the authors, and have ushered in an era of highly competitive, ideologically contentious and close elections. Goodbye, landslides. The Republican Party is now dominated by white Protestants (with evangelicals comprising 59 percent of them in 2004), the Democrats by minorities and non-Christian whites, and neither party can win a national election with only the support of their regional strongholds. Hence, the Midwest battleground will continue to determine the outcome of our elections. Using charts, the authors explore facets of their regional analysis and show how easy it is for national elections to go either way.
Bedside reading for Karl Rove wannabes preparing for 2008.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-6206-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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