An illuminating but uneven political guide.
A starter kit offers advice for novices looking to enter the world of politics.
Nowlan has enjoyed a long and diverse career in politics—in 1968, at the precocious age of 26, he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Since then, he’s tried his hand at various jobs, including campaign manager, lobbyist, newspaper journalist, and college professor. In this slim volume—under 70 pages—the author aims to provide a basic introduction to the American political cosmos “for persons new to politics and government, or who are interested in becoming involved.” Nowlan clearly shares his considerable experience—he discusses the best entry points into politics for newbies, the general structure of political campaigns, and the path to becoming a successful lawmaker. In addition, he includes a discussion of lobbying that captures the informally anecdotal nature of his writing, which is both collegial and lightsomely self-effacing: “I was a terrible lobbyist. The game is not for everyone.” Nowlan’s book radiates an impressive depth of experience, and is brimming with sparkling aperçus. For example, he notes that given the diminishing power of political parties, candidates are desperate for volunteers, making this a uniquely fruitful time for young people to enter the fray. But the volume indulges in some banalities as well. When discussing the importance of ethics in politics, the author presents readers with an anodyne test of self-interest: “Think! Is there any dimension of a decision that could be seen by others to represent personal benefit at public expense, even indirectly? As a savvy political friend mused, ‘How would this decision be viewed by a grand jury?’ ” Yet the work’s principal failing is that it both does too much and too little—those looking for a toehold in political life hardly need a brief consideration on how to be the director of an agency, but they do require much more counsel regarding their first political steps. Given the vast scope and complexity of the American political landscape, Nowlan could have used a lot more pages to express his vibrant opinions. Readers will wish for a much lengthier and more systematic book that truly shares his deep reserve of experience.
An illuminating but uneven political guide.Pub Date: June 21, 2023
ISBN: 979-8823010191
Page Count: 78
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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