A well-researched, effectively argued approach for Democratic communication strategies in swing states.
A political strategist draws on his victories in Arizona in this playbook for the Democratic Party.
“If Democrats are to win again, we must return to what worked in 2020,” writes Grodsky. As director of communications for the Arizona Democratic Party from 2019 to 2021 (a period that saw his party’s presidential candidate win the state for the first time since 1996) and as the communications director for Adrian Fontes’ successful campaign for Arizona’s Secretary of State in 2022 (he won by the largest margin by any non-federal Democratic candidate in state history), the author has a track record of securing victories in one of the nation’s most coveted swing states. These wins, per his telling, were not flukes but “the culmination of a deliberate, disciplined strategy.” Taking lessons from his party’s groundbreaking victories at the grassroots level in Arizona, Grodsky provides a playbook for further success in the 2026 midterm elections and beyond. As much as this book is about replicating the blueprint of 2020, it also offers a scouring critique of what went wrong in 2024. Not only did the party lack “an empathetic tone on the economy” and lazily rely “on monolithic communications practices” with diverse constituencies, per the author, but it also prioritized overly academic “lingo birthed from think tanks that pushed the limits of political correctness.” Regarding issues of racial injustice in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the author argues that too many Democratic pundits on the national level embraced terminology and policies that alienated moderate voters. Grodsky contrasts this failure with his own successful efforts in Arizona, where he led data-driven messaging campaigns that acknowledged the core message of BLM activists “without falling into the trap of the ‘defund’ [the police] rhetoric.” A concise volume that comes in at just over 150 total pages, the work doesn’t sacrifice research-based and anecdotal observations for brevity; the author both builds upon his own battle-tested strategies and also includes almost 20 pages of source citations that underscore his firm grasp of modern political strategy.
A well-researched, effectively argued approach for Democratic communication strategies in swing states.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798234053084
Page Count: 174
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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