An important work full of prudent political ideas despite its meanderings.
An acclaimed thinker reimagines the American government in this political book.
From his personalized California license plate, “GO SANE,” to his nearly two dozen works on business and education, Albrecht has spent a lifetime preaching about the need for thoughtful, evidence-based decisions that challenge the often irrational, inefficient status quo. In this volume, the Mensa Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award winner, business executive, physicist, and former military intelligence officer applies his innovative analysis to American society’s most dysfunctional facet—the government. Eschewing the right-versus-left, Republican-versus-Democrat dichotomy that characterizes American political thought today, this book offers a third path that is both revolutionary in its willingness to overhaul entrenched systems and pragmatic in its fierce devotion to tangible, measured solutions. Using the analogy of a sentimentally beloved yet increasingly dilapidated old house to represent the American government, Albrecht asks: “How can I modernize it and still keep its essential character—the things I love and value about it?” For decades, America’s politicians, the book argues, have constituted “a long parade of mediocre thinkers” who lacked the “visionary leadership” required to revamp the government for 21st-century needs. Alternately, on nearly every major topic germane to contemporary politics, the author presents readers his own ideas that ignore “the old thinking and the old clichés” that have too often permeated American policy conversations. His concepts also disregard bombastic politicians like Donald Trump who dominate the media’s political coverage.
Albrecht’s intriguing proposals span from election reform, which includes mandatory voting and the abolition of the Electoral College, to criminal justice modifications. He calls for increased attention on sexual abuse while shifting from a retribution model of punishment to one centered on restitution. On government revenue, the author recommends that loophole-laden income taxes be replaced by transactional ones that include a tax on stock market trades and a value chain tax. Many policy ideas require a reconceptualization of American society itself, such as the proposals for financial incentives geared toward “de-urbanization” and “de-consumerization” to alleviate global waste and spur citizens’ investments in their own communities. In addition to policy reforms, the book’s sweeping narrative provides a broad overview of American history, identifies the prerequisite “building blocks” of successful republics, and delivers perspectives on myriad topics related to the United States’ place in humanity’s past and future. While the volume is nearly always both insightful and accessible to a general audience, its ambitious drive to cover nearly all aspects of American government and political history sometimes makes for a frustrating read when tangential discussions distract from its more central arguments. Intertwined with the book’s policy ideas is an eclectic assortment of ruminations on topics such as whether we are “amusing ourselves to death” and discursions on the demand for a new national anthem and the need to abolish daylight saving time. There is even a hypothetical conversation between Plato and American policymakers. These numerous digressions slow down the pace of the over 500-page tome. Nevertheless, Albrecht’s refreshing and relentless nonpartisan disposition that replaces finger-pointing with solution-driven ideas is a welcome addition to today’s political discourse. This is a serious book for an era replete with “mediocre leaders” who prioritize hot takes and partisan one-upmanship over sensible, meaningful action.
An important work full of prudent political ideas despite its meanderings.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-913351-42-0
Page Count: 510
Publisher: Eyethink Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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