An upbeat treatise on the strengths of U.S. schools that would have benefited from more specifics.
Tech entrepreneur Sahin makes a case for the benefits of the contemporary American K-12 and university systems.
The author immigrated from Turkey to the United States as a teenage foreign-exchange student and completed a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Industrial Management; he went on to build companies in the tech sector and amass a large fortune. Drawing on his experiences, Sahin describes what he perceives as the many praiseworthy aspects of U.S. education. He asserts that it isn’t failing youth in the 21st century, as many believe, but uniquely capable of creating “well-rounded individuals,” and he credits the degree of decentralization and local control as a major reason for its robustness. Despite evident disparities in funding and outcomes in various American schools, he presents the nation’s primary and secondary educational systems as laboratories of innovation. Specifically, he sees competition between educational institutions—public, charter, and private—as a source of strength, and an extension of the market-based economics that shape American society. He also notes a spirit of volunteerism and initiative, suggesting that these cultivate leadership skills in students that other countries’ schools don’t teach. This element, he says, attracts students from around the world to the United States. Throughout this work, many readers may wish that the author had cited more statistics to support his positive assertions. That said, Sahin does concede that there is much room for improvement in U.S. schools; for example, he notes the ongoing crisis in special education funding, the declining enrollments that many schools face as a result of declining birth rates, and the increase in educational costs beyond the rate of inflation. Nevertheless, he argues that the American educational system has consistently demonstrated the ability to evolve in response to social changes, and he anticipates its continued resilience.
An upbeat treatise on the strengths of U.S. schools that would have benefited from more specifics.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798887507323
Page Count: 176
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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