An often well-reasoned, if sometimes speculative, challenge to American political orthodoxy.
A rumination on contemporary American politics.
“The common ground” in American political discourse, writes McKinney, has been replaced by “two warring ideological camps refusing to consider any possible merit in their opponent’s arguments.” In an effort to bridge this divide, he provides readers seven essays with what he characterizes as pragmatic solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing issues. Many offer alternative perspectives than those proposed by both major parties; on gun control, for instance, the book recognizes a need for rural Americans to have access to guns for self-protection, given their isolation from law enforcement, but also sees value in regulating weapons that have the “capacity for mass casualties.” His health care chapter, rather than focusing on costs or insurance, suggests that solutions should be directed toward corporations that inundate the food supply chain with “adulterated,” unhealthy, and addictive foods. Other essays focus on such topics as education, employment, and aspects of foreign policy, and a postscript provides an analysis of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. McKinney seems most passionate about environmentalism, which appears in multiple chapters, and he tackles the beliefs of climate change–deniers head-on; one particularly engaging idea is a kinetic energy project that converts the compression of airport foot traffic into usable energy. So central is the environmental crisis to McKinney’s vision of future political issues that he goes so far as to predict a resurgence of the Green Party as a viable third party. For the most part, though, this deliberately nonpartisan book straightforwardly lays out the Republican and Democratic stances on various issues with minimal criticism, which may be refreshing to some readers but will frustrate others as both-sides-ism. Nuanced disagreements within political parties are also largely ignored in this framework, be they conflicts between neoliberals and the left within the Democratic Party, or between the alt-right and fiscal conservatives among Republicans. There’s also a lack of citations and hard data to back up the author’s claims, which would have been made stronger with quantitative evidence.
An often well-reasoned, if sometimes speculative, challenge to American political orthodoxy.Pub Date: April 21, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-74-223087-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
