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
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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