A politically charged meander down highways and byways, and just right for our time.
A lively, thoughtful memoir of being a stranger in a strange land.
Hough (Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, 2021) cuts quite a figure at the outset: “a six-foot-tall lesbian with a haircut that had grown out a little from ‘lesbian going through some shit,’ but not enough,” wandering into the decidedly unhip confines of Shamrock, Texas, a little burg on the way to Amarillo. The people are nice, regardless of her unwonted appearance, she allows; but, back home in Austin, it’s getting ever harder to live in the old, weird ways the city was known for, now a place where a “murder shack” goes for a million bucks. Buying a van that “looked like it might belong to a retiree or a meth cook,” Hough hits the road in an approximation of the route John Steinbeck followed in Travels With Charley (1962), complete with a dog of her own named Woody Guthrie. Helpful Texas friends offered her guns for the trip, which she declines, though there are a few fraught moments awaiting her. More common are the simple puzzles of our time: why it should be, for instance, that Confederate flags should be flying in New Hampshire and at Plymouth Rock. Hough is cheerfully obscene: Describing the giant box-store-cum-gas-station that is Buc-ee’s, a staple of the South, she pegs it as “what might happen if a 7-Eleven fucked a Cracker Barrel.” But more, she is an astute observer, commiserating with the forgotten and left-behind people of the Ozarks and the Appalachians, their psychic wounds salved with opioids, and with the fieldworkers of Washington, paid barely enough to live and hounded by ICE. Concludes Hough, “I’m just one person who took a road trip with my dog. If I’ve got anything to say, it’s only this—I’m tired of blaming those with no power for all that’s gone wrong with our world.”
A politically charged meander down highways and byways, and just right for our time.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9780593686621
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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