The subtitle says it all: a useful guide to moving forward after Trumpism.
A manual for saving democracy from its current “existential threat.”
After the 2016 presidential election, wife-and-husband team Greenberg and Levin used the insights they learned while working as congressional staffers who “could demystify Congress and show people how scaring the crap out of their own representatives was their most effective tool for resisting Trump” and his many enablers within Congress. The online guide they created went viral and became the blueprint for this book. Importantly, the authors understand, at a deep psychological level, elected officials’ obsession with attaining reelection. Encouraging constituents in each congressional district to band together in real life—not only online—served as the foundation for Greenberg and Levin’s 19-point guide. “Individuals have opinions; groups have power,” they write. As digital viewers of the guide began banding together to form groups dubbed “Indivisible chapters” (there are now more than 5,000), the authors realized they needed to quit their jobs in order to manage the groundswell of resistance. Soon, Greenberg and Levin had received enough donations to hire a central staff dedicated to advising the locally based Indivisible chapters. From bitter experience, the authors knew that tactics developed previously by tea party advocates and other far-right constituents demonstrated effectiveness in shaking up elected politicians of all ideologies. Near the opening of this book, readers will find all 19 points set out on two consecutive pages, and they include “Don’t Be Boring,” “Pictures, or It Didn’t Happen,” “Don’t Get Defensive About Your Privilege,” and “Primaries Are Good If We Make Them Good.” The remainder of the book takes each lesson in turn. Some of the tactics are meant to help attain short-term policy initiatives. Ultimately, however, the tactics, used wisely, are meant to defeat Trumpism by replacing his supporters on Election Day. The authors clearly explain how a long history of civic engagement in the U.S. can be reignited leading up to the 2020 election.
The subtitle says it all: a useful guide to moving forward after Trumpism.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-98-212997-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
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
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