Persuasively argues that self-interested leadership has imperiled the American Republic.
A searing indictment of American politics since 2000.
In January 46 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar illegally led his troops across the Rubicon, a small river north of Rome, he set the Roman Republic on a course toward dictatorship. For veteran journalist Danner (Torture and Truth, 2004, etc.), the parallels with President Trump’s incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are obvious. Yet, as Danner clarifies in this collection of 22 acerbic essays from The New York Review of Books, Jan. 6 was not the first American Rubicon crossing since 2000. Writing with a light touch—he prefers to record his impressions while hustling across the country in rented convertibles—he keeps asking the same probing question: Why have the institutions of the American Republic not provided better safeguards against recent abuse by “grifters and fools?” He begins his chronicle of infamies with the verdict of Bush v. Gore, excoriates the unwinnable war against Iraq, and condemns the global war on terror (“a giant floundering about in search of a small insurgent group”) as a pretext for justifying human rights violations. He does not exempt President Obama, who, for all his personal charisma and commitment to universal health care, the author argues, prolonged many policies of his predecessors, including mass surveillance at home and drone warfare abroad. Danner’s stylistic fireworks culminate in a 2008 essay painting an indelible picture of Obama on the campaign trail, “bursting up onto the stage…shoulders bent slightly concave, gathering everything into those constantly clapping hands,” a man taking pleasure in his own gracefulness. A master of the put-down epithet, Danner calls Trump “the grand artist of grievance” and his son Don Jr. “a just-past-his-prime used-car salesman.” The British politician and writer Horace Walpole once said that “a country will never be saved by the best men in it,” but Danner suggests that a series of not-so-good and bad leaders, aided by a supine Congress, just might break a republic.
Persuasively argues that self-interested leadership has imperiled the American Republic.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798896230892
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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