A nuanced, smart collection that argues that politicians will ignore rural America only at their peril.
Resentments abound in the heartland—and they’re not out of place, according to the journalists in this anthology.
The prevailing narrative of the 2016 electoral post-mortem was that the people of “flyover country” were uneducated voters who cast their ballots for an undisguised con man against their interests. However, as Shuler and Croley note, that narrative missed an important point: The rural electorate comprises “too many people whose lives have been hollowed out in the last forty years by unchecked capitalism and globalization” and who clearly felt that the Democratic candidate had no interest in them. In January 2017, Journalist Ted Genoways inaugurated what he called the Between Coast Forums, whose topics included how better to cover rural America and “how to subvert a mainstream narrative that seemed false from our vantage points.” This illuminating volume is the result. Among its revelations is the fact that “flyover country” is where most Native Americans live, and there are only 19 journalists “tasked to cover Native affairs for their local newsrooms.” This is in keeping, writes Maggie Messitt, with a significant flaw: “The history of U.S. journalism is largely a history of neglecting and even harming disenfranchised communities—black communities, immigrant communities, Native communities, poor white communities.” Elsewhere, an inmate recounts what it’s like to be imprisoned in the middle of the pandemic: “Social distancing is absolutely impossible in prison. I can reach to the left or right of me and literally touch my neighbor’s bed.” The best piece is by writer Bryan Mealer, who recalls his road trip with his nonagenarian cousin to fulfill a dream of hers—shake the hand of Donald Trump—and takes the opportunity to call on some of these underserved communities where both sides listen to each other. “She still loves Trump, especially when he tweets, but that doesn’t mean the journey was in vain,” he writes. Other contributors include Peter Slevin, Tamara Winfrey-Harris, and Mei-Ling Hopgood.
A nuanced, smart collection that argues that politicians will ignore rural America only at their peril.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982147-77-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tiller Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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