If “Let’s go, Brandon” is your idea of elevated political discourse, then this is your book.
A conservative commentator lays into the current president with a familiar litany of complaints.
Strassel, author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, juxtaposes Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, linking the two on the undeniably problematic issues of inflation and energy as well as foreign policy. According to the author, it was all Carter’s fault that the mullahs held the embassy staff in Tehran for so long (never mind the Reagan team’s back-channel deal to delay their release until after the election), just as “Biden’s reckless withdrawal from Afghanistan embarrassed our allies, abandoned Afghanis, and made the U.S. look weak” (never mind that Trump’s team negotiated that retreat). Furthermore, Biden exaggerated in the midterms when he “crisscrossed the country recalling the January 6 riot and insisting ‘democracy’ was on the ballot.” Strassel excoriates the supposedly radical-left administration now in the White House, contrasting Biden with the more centrist Carter crowd and drubbing both by comparison with her apparent hero, Ronald Reagan, who “didn’t lead with cultural issues.” It’s a relief when Strassel eventually finishes wailing away on liberals and gets to work on her own team, allowing that the midterm election didn’t quite work out the way the GOP wanted because voters preferred Democrats to “disfavored Republicans [who] had something in common: strong ties to Trump.” The author spends much of the latter part of the book conjuring up notions of a big-tent Republicanism that eschews Proud Boys–like militancy, at least in public, and instead urges that “if politicians want to see a change in the culture, they could start by acting like grown-ups.” Perhaps, for starters, by not insisting that “many of Biden’s people…were picked because they checked an identity-politics box.”
If “Let’s go, Brandon” is your idea of elevated political discourse, then this is your book.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781538756218
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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