A timely contribution to the literature on an urgent issue.
In a book that took 10 years to research and write, journalist Cohn offers a thorough history of the persistent controversy over health care insurance in the U.S.
In other developed countries, writes the author, governments “are firmly in charge, using some form of taxes or mandatory premiums to finance benefits.” But the U.S. has seen an often vociferous debate “over what obligations society has to its most vulnerable members.” Cohn provides an informative overview of health coverage efforts beginning in the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter all supported public health plans, but they faced opposition from private insurers and conservative politicians. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan led that opposition as president, tapping into widespread anger over federal support programs. Bill Clinton’s efforts to devise a plan encountered opposition from multiple fronts, including within his own party. In 2006, as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney instituted bold reforms that gave the state’s citizens better access to health care and increased financial security, a model that later inspired Obama’s plans for national health care. Nevertheless, in 2010, Scott Brown won election as senator from Massachusetts by attacking Romney’s measure “as a corrupt, secretive exercise by political insiders.” Cohn traces the fraught development of the Affordable Care Act, the controversy and compromises that led to its passage, and the continuing debate. Republican opposition, he asserts, began immediately after the law was signed on March 23, 2010, and became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters. “At its core,” Cohn writes, “universal health care is all about common strength in common vulnerability. It’s a recognition that anybody can get sick or injured—that, by pooling resources together, everybody will be safe. It’s the same exact concept as Social Security and Medicare, and why the party responsible for them has spent nearly a century trying to extend health care guarantees to the rest of the population.”
A timely contribution to the literature on an urgent issue.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-27093-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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