A knowledgeable and timely perspective on the current fraught state of democracy.
A concise study of how free speech has changed throughout America's history.
Cose has had a remarkably distinguished career: Newsweek columnist and contributing editor, New York Daily News editorial page chief, fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, and inaugural writer-in-residence at the ACLU, among other positions. His latest book is a cogent, well-informed analysis of the vexed problem of free speech. The freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment, writes the author, was crafted by “frustrated and exhausted men” who believed that “in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad.” Within a decade, however, the Alien and Sedition Act curtailed speech attacking the government; Cose cites many more subsequent cases when courts have ruled on “the question of what is acceptable and what is not, what speech merits protection and what speech deserves punishment.” There has never been a time, he writes, without constraints on speech. The author examines many impediments to free speech, such as voter suppression; the Citizens United decision; and the Electoral College and the Senate, both resulting from the founders’ suspicion of direct democracy. Cose also considers free speech protests on college campuses, suggesting that students need instruction in critical thinking in order to evaluate information and misinformation. The author is deeply troubled by dialogue “dominated by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and other apps that specialize in bursts of short, superficial communication.” The nation’s founders had no foresight to know that the First Amendment, “which was designed to enable the people to speak truth to power—would be hijacked by hatemongers, propagandists, and opportunists more interested in despoiling democracy and degrading debate than in ensuring that a diverse nation speaks in harmony.” When “lies swaddled in bigotry” dominate political dialogue, the fantasy of free speech, and our “absolutist illusions” about the founders’ intentions, has become pernicious.
A knowledgeable and timely perspective on the current fraught state of democracy.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-299971-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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