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
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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