Politicians, campaign strategists, and trend-watchers will find much to ponder—or fret over, depending on where they sit.
Liberals, take heart: the day is fast approaching when Newt Gingrich and George Bush will be forgotten names in a better America.
So prophesy New Republic editor Judis (The Paradox of American Democracy, 2000, etc.) and Century Foundation fellow Teixeira (The Disappearing American Voter, not reviewed) in this slender but not slight study published just in time for the midterm election, which should test some of their assumptions. Now inured to the culture of postindustrial capitalism, Americans are inclined to a political center that appears more and more progressive, the authors write; “they want government to play an active and responsible role in American life, guaranteeing a reasonable level of economic security to Americans rather than leaving them at the mercy of the market and the business cycle.” Conservative Republicans had their day, Judis and Teixeira add, in a time when most people seemed bent on repudiating the values of the 1960s; but voters are discovering that some of those values were not so bad, while Republicans “are putting forth remedies for problems that no longer exist and ignoring problems that do.” More and more voters are thus casting their ballots in favor of socially progressive candidates, a trend that is particularly pronounced in former conservative bastions such as Florida, southern California, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.—as well as the suburbs of Any City, U.S.A.: “In the past, cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were Democratic, while the surrounding suburbs were Republican. Now the entire metropolitan area in many of these locations has become solidly Democratic.” Backing their forecast with solid data from recent elections and censuses, Judis and Teixeira predict a significant and decisive shift toward a true Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, perhaps within an election or two.
Politicians, campaign strategists, and trend-watchers will find much to ponder—or fret over, depending on where they sit.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2691-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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