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
This second of a projected 14 volumes of Martin Luther King's collected works covers the period from his postgraduate education at Boston University's School of Theology through the end of his first year as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. (his year-end report notes accomplishments ranging from carpeting the church's auditorium to registering voters). Correspondence, academic papers (and in his introduction Carson confronts head on the issue of King's plagiarism), sermons, published and unpublished writings are all included, reflecting the young man's developing thoughts about theology, ethics, and the role of the Baptist minister in his church. All the texts are annotated, and some original documents are reproduced. The longest work here is King's dissertation on the concept of God in the writings of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, a concept that differed from his own belief in a personal God. The volume leaves the young minster on the eve of a watershed in his own life, in the life of his people, and in the life of America as a whole: the Montgomery bus boycott.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-07951-5
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.
Pensive travels in the wake of one of the world’s most devastating recent disasters, the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.
As Parry (People Who Eat Darkness, 2012, etc.), Tokyo bureau chief of the Times of London, writes, Japan is readier than any other nation for disaster, especially earthquake. Tokyo buildings are meant to stand up to shaking, even if they’re highly flammable, and Japanese citizens have been drilled and know what to do. So, too, the author: “I had lived in Japan for sixteen years,” he writes, “and I knew, or believed that I knew, a good deal about earthquakes.” Yet, when the seafloor started shaking off the northeastern coast of Honshu on March 11, 2011, only a few experts could foresee what would soon unfold: the destruction of the nuclear reactor at Fukushima, the landfall of a wall of water 120 feet high, and a wave of death as people struggled to find safety on higher ground. An enterprising journalist, Parry visited the devastation in the immediate aftermath, and he recounts his experiences among grieving and dazed residents, many of those survivors having lost children as schools were swallowed up in seawater. The author’s narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting. One memorable moment comes when he describes someone brought back from the brink of madness by a perhaps unlikely method: namely, being sprinkled with holy water and thus freed from the hold of “the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead.” Parry’s set pieces come to have a certain predictability: expert–victim–expert–survivor. Yet they retain their urgency, for, as he writes, it won’t be long before another earthquake of similar or even greater intensity strikes Tokyo proper, with its millions of inhabitants; in that event, “the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs.”
A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-25397-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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