Candid, timely reading.
The editor-in-chief of the Atlantic gathers five essays on key figures from the modern Republican Party who have exemplified—or utterly distorted—the meaning of patriotism.
As the Trump administration came to an end, Goldberg published articles about Republicans who chose to serve their country rather than the whims of a “racist…misogynist [and] megalomaniac” president. Among those he celebrates are former Arizona senator John McCain, who turned down early release from captivity in North Vietnam “unless all [other American POWs] were released with him.” In his later years as a statesman, he became a “North Star” to other Republicans, including fellow senator Lindsay Graham. But when Trump—who once famously declared that “avoiding STDs, in the 1990s was his own personal Vietnam”—took office, McCain stood almost completely alone in supporting the Constitution as other Republicans (including Graham) chose to support the president, who said about McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Another individual Goldberg highlights is former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. Though he never outwardly disobeyed or criticized Trump, in the weeks before the 2020 election, he reassured allies and adversaries about U.S. stability, an act Trump later called “treasonous.” Milley also told lawmakers and media figures that the “military would play no role” in the outcome. The armed forces serve the country and not the president, a point Milley dared to make in front of hardcore Trumpists like Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. As the author showcases the sometimes maligned heroes who have battled to save the U.S. from the growing rot within, he also reveals the frightening ease with which democracy can be undermined by those unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to protect it.
Candid, timely reading.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781638932048
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Zando
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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