A concise and persuasive indictment of the Electoral College.
A debut political book explores the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College.
Dedicating his volume to “all voters,” Moyer provides readers with “a nonpartisan discussion of how elections for presidential electors work.” In 23 short chapters and in under 130 pages, this work surveys the origins of the Electoral College and the ways in which it has historically served to obfuscate the will of the voters. Much of the book’s focus is on the theoretical implications of the system, including the oft-discussed power imbalance, where small states have disproportionate electoral representation over more populous ones. Some chapters, though, provide enlightening vignettes that, for example, compare United States elections to those in East Germany and explore outlier states like Nebraska and Maine that use a presidential elector districting system. Ultimately, Moyer concludes in his convincing analysis, the Electoral College system represents a “democracy denied,” as it has been utilized in a way that leaves “voters with as few choices as possible to maximize the power of the two major political parties at the expense of voters.” Moreover, not only are third party and independent candidates denied meaningful opportunities, but the ballots also often obscure the fact that most people are not directly voting for a presidential candidate but are instead backing a slate of unknown electors. Accompanied by over three dozen charts, graphs, timelines, and other visual aids, and written in a style that is accessible to average voters who may not be aware of the intricacies of U.S. elections, this book delivers an engaging appraisal. Most useful is its inclusion of sample ballots across American history that demonstrate the ways they were constructed to mislead voters. Ample appendix materials provide additional evidence that complements Moyer’s argument that “we are not having a free and fair election.” And while the volume’s subtitle is a bit misleading, as the work is far from a comprehensive “History of the Electoral College,” it more than succeeds in its goal of presenting readers with a convincing case against the current system.
A concise and persuasive indictment of the Electoral College.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8530501685
Page Count: -
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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