A pleasantly informative look at a depressingly familiar topic. Veteran political reporter Witcover (The Year the Dream Died, 1997, etc.) offers a treasure trove of stories, background, and commentary on an electoral system that is broken. He traces the evolution of presidential campaigns and press coverage, identifying the obvious authors—professional advisors, money, and television—of our current problems. Scorn is heaped on political mercenaries with no issues, no ideological or personal loyalties, who advise candidates to buy large amounts of television time and then pocket a percentage of the expenditures. Candidates tapping personal fortunes to bypass the usual winnowing process fare no better, for their free-spending use of television forces the other candidates to respond in kind if they can: “Forbes demonstrated how a person who wants to try to buy the presidency can effectively distort the process, state by state.” Two-track presidential campaigns in which direct access to the candidate is strictly limited and his or her message is conveyed only through paid commercials leave the press in a paradoxical situation: “The reporters who spend the most time with the candidates often see the least of the campaign as it is being seen by most voters.” Meanwhile, voters are distracted by seeing candidates constantly on the tube even though they actually know little if anything about them. The puzzling aspect of this issue is why Americans continue to put up with this nonsense, and Witcover points to half of the answer in noting that incumbents are nervous about and resist reform because “the system, for all its faults, has worked for them.” Unfortunately, he is unable to explain why electoral reform is such a low priority for the public beyond speculating that no one expects any better of politicians anyway. A nice contribution, but Witcover is chronicling an apathy-generating system his efforts are unlikely to overcome.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-22303-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.
Profound contrasts in policing and incarceration reveal disparate Americas.
MSNBC host and editor at large of the Nation, Hayes (Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, 2013, etc.) expands the investigation of inequality begun in his previous book by focusing on law and order. Offering a persuasive analysis, he distinguishes between the Nation, inhabited by the “affluent, white, elite,” and the Colony, largely urban, poor, “overwhelmingly black and brown” but increasingly including working-class whites. The criminal justice system, argues Hayes, is vastly different for each: “One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land.” In the Colony, “real democratic accountability is lacking and police behave like occupying soldiers in restive and dangerous territory.” Law enforcement, as noted by law professor Seth Stoughton, takes a “warrior worldview” in which “officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies.” Acknowledging that America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, Hayes traces the country’s history of punishment to the experience of European settlers who, “outnumbered and afraid,” responded with violence. Between 1993 and 2014, although the crime rate declined significantly, most Americans feel that crime has increased and therefore support aggressive police action. Furthermore, although most crime occurs intraracially, the Nation believes that the Colony is a constant, insidious threat; unmistakably, “we have moved the object of our concern from crime to criminals, from acts to essences.” Among other rich democracies, ours is the only one with the death penalty. Whereas in Europe, humane treatment has been widely instituted, in the U.S., perpetrators are treated as unredeemable. “The American justice system is all about wrath and punishment,” the author asserts. Arguing for the erasure of borders between Nation and Colony, Hayes admits, regretfully, that such change might fundamentally alter the comfortable sense of order that he, and other members of the Nation, prizes.
A timely and impassioned argument for social justice.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-25422-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.
Essays focused on an overarching question: “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?”
Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel Prize laureate Morrison (Emeritus, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; God Help the Child, 2015, etc.) offers perceptive reflections on the configuration of Otherness. Revised from her Norton Lectures at Harvard, the volume consists of six essays that consider how race is conceived, internalized, and culturally transmitted, drawing in part on writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the African writer Camara Laye, whose novel The Radiance of the King Morrison greatly admires. Laye told the story of a white man, stranded and destitute in Africa, struggling to maintain his assumptions of white privilege. For Morrison, the novel illuminates the pressures that “make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” She also offers insightful glosses into her own aims as a novelist. “Narrative fiction,” she writes, “provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.” In Beloved, for example, she reimagined the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who had killed her children rather than see them enslaved, as she had been. In A Mercy, she examined “the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion.” In Paradise, she delved into the issue of hierarchies of blackness by looking at “the contradictory results of devising a purely raced community”; she purposely did not identify her characters’ race in order to “simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was.” In God Help the Child, Morrison considered “the triumphalism and deception that colorism fosters.” Her current novel in progress, she discloses, explores “the education of a racist—how does one move from a non-racial womb to the womb of racism”?
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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