Intelligent reading well suited to this moment.
A writer and English professor explores the “uncomfortable truths” of what it means to be a White, middle-class man in 21st-century America.
Speaking from the perspective of middle age, Franklin boldly confronts the “delusional thinking” he views as “killing us softly, one narcissistic fairy tale at a time.” He does so through 12 essays that muse on the many self-deceptions in which he and countless Americans have engaged. The author begins by examining his role as a father through the game of toy soldiers he sometimes plays with his three sons. The game appears to be a harmless bonding activity, but as Franklin suggests, it also speaks to the way “masculinity and mayhem” are inextricably intertwined in American culture. The author observes that the same ready acceptance of surface truth has also characterized his view of class issues. While he was a poor graduate student in southeastern Ohio, he donated plasma for money and saw a connection between himself and the poverty-stricken miners in neighboring communities who did the same. Deeper interrogation forced Franklin to realize that his situation was temporary while the coal miners’ situation was not. Ultimately, he was as equally deluded about the “relative ease of social mobility” as he was clueless about “the challenges of systemic poverty.” Later in the book, Franklin probes how the continued existence of color lines in America means that he will always see young Black men like Trayvon Martin as different from his sons and that this difference will always preclude the “shared vulnerabilities” that make empathy possible. The best he can do is teach his sons to “embrace the humility and compassion necessary to get to know boys like Trayvon Martin.” Wise and humane, Franklin’s book offers a timely, socially relevant portrait of the struggles facing thoughtful citizens seeking to create a more just society for every American.
Intelligent reading well suited to this moment.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1210-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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