A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges.
A cheerfully profane assault on laws that, by constitutional scholar and commentator Mystal’s account, need to be shredded.
“We live in a dystopian fucking future where Amazon knows that I need to buy new underwear before I do, but we’re supposed to pretend that it is difficult for the U.S. government to know if I’m eligible to vote?” So asks Mystal, opposing voter ID and other registration laws: Anything else, he insists, is an untoward effort on the part of the white majority-cum-minority to restrict voting rights on the part of anyone who’s not them. Just so, he insists, immigration laws are overblown, assuming that immigrants are “as violent and depraved as Trump,” though he harbors little hope of change: Whites will declare citizen Latinos to be white enough to help them close the border, and Latinos “will reward them by voting Republican” and repressing Latinos on the other side of the fence. Some of Mystal’s examples wander into areas few readers will likely have thought about. His analysis of airline deregulation is richly detailed, but in the end it comes to a full-throated denunciation of a market system in which there are very few winners (and those who “vote with your wallet,” he notes, need wallets thick enough to make their targets pay attention). Mystal mounts persuasive arguments against such things as laws that remove discretionary power from judges, school choice that allows conservative parents to dictate curricula that accommodates “their bigoted, unscientific, private predilections,” and much else that is fundamentally antidemocratic. He concludes with the provocative—and promising—suggestion that apportionment of congressional seats be for every 580,000 persons, meaning Wyoming gets its representative but California gets a dozen more, which “would go a long way toward restoring basic representative democracy in this country.”
A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781620978580
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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