A clearsighted analysis of the systemic class war that the 1 percent is waging on the rest—and without penalty.
A distinguished political scientist condemns the “social murder” of America’s working people committed by corporations, the wealthy, and the state.
Murder is a very real thing, writes Gottschalk: “Tens of millions of US gun owners are locked and loaded, ready to take the law into their own hands or to turn their guns on themselves.” Death by despair, as it has been dubbed, is also rampant, with high rates of drug addiction and alcohol abuse. Police officers increasingly visit violence on people, particularly people of color, and go unpunished; meanwhile, people of color find themselves incarcerated at rates far higher than the white population, penal policy having “become the policy of first resort to address the massive economic and social dislocations of the last half century in the United States.” Against this backdrop, Gottschalk’s central thesis is that many societal strands, from militarized police to a pattern of “forever wars” and the increasing financialization of the economy all combine into state-sponsored, class-based violence against ordinary Americans, who live, it seems, in a different country from the wealthy, who commit all sorts of economic crimes—fraud, wage theft, and the like. Writes Gottschalk, “Crime in the suites victimizes more people and causes more harm than crime in the streets.” For all that, a battery of laws constitutes a kind of “corporate shield” that protects wrongdoers from prosecution, apart from the occasional sacrificial lamb: The regulatory agencies, for instance, “made a spectacle of sentencing Bernie Madoff to essentially die in prison while ignoring the willful blindness of regulators and leading bankers that allowed his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme to flourish for decades.” There are remedies, Gottschalk notes, that may never be applied, from taxing the ultrawealthy to reforming tort law to remove barriers to suing corporations and government agencies.
A clearsighted analysis of the systemic class war that the 1 percent is waging on the rest—and without penalty.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780691275253
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
