An accomplished chronicle of the setbacks and successes by a journalist in the trenches.
A committed gay rights journalist thoroughly tracks the president’s hard-won “evolution” in embracing the national LBGT agenda.
Daily Kos columnist Eleveld, who covered President Barack Obama for four years at the Advocate, pursues the reluctant endorsement of the then-senator by the gay community in 2008—they were disappointed by Obama’s definition of marriage as a sacred union between a man and a woman—through the triumphant June 2015 decision by the Supreme Court to allow the right of same-sex couples to marry in all 50 states. Obama inherited President Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, although it had proven disastrously controversial. The passage of Proposition 8 in California in November 2008 prohibiting same-sex marriage seemed to underscore for Obama and the entire Democratic leadership that LGBT equality was too hot an issue to take on electorally. Eleveld shows how Obama danced around the issue for years: first in choosing and then replacing the champion of Proposition 8 to give the invocation at his inauguration, then in a tortured repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, first enacted in 1996 and finally gutted in 2013. Eleveld’s chronological story involves the relentless push by activists demanding that the president do the right thing—i.e., to secure full legal rights for gay spouses and to advance LGBT legislation. The successes of AIDS activists in the 1980s served as inspiration for the new direct-action groups, namely ACT UP and GetEQUAL, while momentum was building from the successful film Milk, as well as a well-publicized National Equality March on Washington in October 2009. Capitol Hill hearings with the Pentagon on DADT underscored the policy’s inefficacy, forcing a vote in Congress for repeal in 2010, a huge victory for the gay rights community after “seventeen years of sustained activism.” Throughout the book, the author explores the president’s principles versus political expediency.
An accomplished chronicle of the setbacks and successes by a journalist in the trenches.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-07489-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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