This should be today’s go-to book on its subject.
A warts-and-all history of “the oldest mass party in the world.”
In his latest, Kazin, a Georgetown historian and editor emeritus of Dissent, delivers a lively, timely survey whose central theme is the Democrats’ two-centuries-long effort to assist ordinary working people. That theme is neither novel nor, coming from a historian of the left, surprising. Yet despite the author’s Democratic favoritism—he occasionally writes in the first person—this is not an anti-Republican tract. Like Heather Cox Richardson’s analogous history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free, Kazin applies tough scrutiny and due criticism to an institution that, as early as the 1840s, was unparalleled in its electoral and institutional innovations and acceptance of popular politics. While erring in calling Thomas Jefferson’s original Democratic-Republican Party a “proto-party” and ignoring earlier pioneering state-level achievements in enlarging the electorate, Kazin is on solid ground. To enliven his narrative and illustrate his arguments, he foregrounds often forgotten public figures like William Jennings Bryan (whose biography, A Godly Hero, Kazin wrote), Belle Moskowitz, Sidney Hillman, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The author’s chapter on New York politics and Tammany Hall is brilliant. He doesn’t shy away from emphasizing the party’s control by Southern slaveholders, starting in the days of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and extending into the 1860s, nor the outright racism of their heirs. He also digs into the deep misogyny in party ranks and the schisms that resulted from its extraordinary, unprecedented diversity—except for the long exclusion of African Americans. Without flinching, Kazin charts the party’s downward course from Franklin Roosevelt’s huge 1936 election victory—“the most complete victory in the history of partisan presidential elections”—to its abject losses starting in the 1960s. As the narrative thins toward the end, arriving at the present day, the author closes with unmistakable tones of lament for the party’s recent fortunes and missteps.
This should be today’s go-to book on its subject.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-20023-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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