A necessary addition to the bookshelves of history buffs and political science enthusiasts.
An eye-opening exploration of America’s two-party system.
In this debut book, attorney DiStefano, a former adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, concludes that a drastic change to American politics is coming soon. He focuses on the concept of party realignment, in which political parties are formed, reformed, and even extinguished over the course of history. Realignments occur, DiStefano explains, when political realities shift and new issues and attitudes force change. The bulk of this work recounts the five different party systems that the United States has known since its inception. It begins with the birth of the two-party system under Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson and continues through the realignments of the Jacksonian era, the run-up to the Civil War, the populism of Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, and the disruption of the Great Depression. Although the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention political parties, the author argues that its system of governance promotes the continuing existence of two such parties—with each within striking distance of a majority. But America’s current system, DiStefano notes, has basically debated the New Deal for eight decades while America has moved on to other issues: “All our parties know how to do—all they were designed to do—is to fight about the world of Franklin Roosevelt.” Readers who are well versed in political science will already be familiar with the concept of party realignment at the center of this book. Still, many will find that DiStefano’s conclusions are full of common sense, even if the blur of today’s contentious political discussion seems to hide such seemingly simple realities. Overall, the author does an admirable job of putting history into perspective and providing a balanced view of how the winds of today’s political climate may be blowing. Whether the next realignment is quick and easy or long and drawn-out depends on whether voters and politicians recognize the need for party reform, DiStefano asserts.
A necessary addition to the bookshelves of history buffs and political science enthusiasts.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63388-508-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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