A cogent, well-documented analysis of the 2016 election.
Racial and religious anxieties, more than economic worries, fueled Donald Trump’s victory.
Political science professors Sides (George Washington Univ.; The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, 2013, etc.), Vavreck (UCLA; The Gamble, 2013, etc.), and Tesler (Univ. of California, Irvine; Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era, 2016, etc.) counter some popular assumptions about the surprising outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which pitted two “historically unpopular presidential candidates” against each other. In a narrative replete with graphs and tables, the authors argue against the prevalent idea that Trump attracted white voters who felt victimized by loss of jobs and worries over economic insecurity, instead mounting abundant evidence for their contention that group identities mattered more to voters than perceptions of economic hardship or inequality. “Simple narratives about voter anger,” they write, “obscured who was angry and why.” They assert that in the Republican Party, “divisions centered on how voters felt about groups they did not belong to, including blacks, Muslims, and immigrants.” These groups generated strong emotions and activated white voters’ racial and religious identities, both of which had deepened during Barack Obama’s presidency and caused a backlash against diversity. The authors cite three main reasons for Trump’s victory: “fractured ranks” within the Republican Party that impeded party leaders from coalescing behind any candidate; outsized media coverage of Trump that made him appear to be the front-runner even when coverage focused on scandals; and “racialized economics,” in which racial attitudes “shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.” Hillary Clinton had problems with both message and campaign strategy, never attracting enough support from diverse voters, including women. The authors doubt that Russian interference changed the outcome of the election. “Russian-sponsored content,” they conclude, “was an infinitesimal fraction” of tweets and posts, and although this content was “misleading and polarizing,” the campaign was already filled with similar incendiary content. Moreover, they maintain, “most voters are predictable partisans whose minds are hard to change.”
A cogent, well-documented analysis of the 2016 election.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17419-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
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
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