Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.
The 2016 election finds the author on a search for the real America.
Sexton (Creative Writing/Georgia Southern Univ.; I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, 2016, etc.) found himself in the political cross hairs when some of his reportage on the Trump campaign drew attention—and even death threats—from his supporters. “Trump wasn’t the cause, he was the disease personified,” writes the author, and then continues, “Trump’s true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming an instrument.” Yet these people are as recognizable to Sexton as his own family and the blue-collar milieu in which he was raised, and he understands how and why Hillary Clinton couldn’t connect with them. He has more of an affinity for Bernie Sanders, who inflamed the passions of the left just as Trump had with the right and whose campaign went from making a statement to a surprisingly strong bid for victory. The author reserves his deepest exasperation for those purists of the far left who refused to see a significant difference between Trump and Clinton and who even turned on Sanders when he attempted to unify the party. “They were purists,” he writes. “To them, there was right and then there was wrong.” Sexton’s campaign coverage comes from a ground-floor, grass-roots perspective. The only convention that gave him press credentials was that of the Green Party, so he generally writes from the periphery, among the crowds who sometimes seem more like mobs at the rallies. Whatever he learned didn’t make him more prescient, since pretty much until election night, he strongly believed (as did millions of others) that “Donald Trump will not be president.” His book sometimes feels like a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s clear that Sexton couldn’t believe what he had seen until it was too late.
Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-956-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
PROFILES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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