Read this excellent book; it’s your civic duty.
Daily Beast columnist Tomasky (Bill Clinton, 2017, etc.) confirms what we already knew—America is polarized—and masterfully charts how it always has been that way, especially at the beginning. What we are now experiencing is pure tribalism.
In decades past, political quarrels often ran within party lines as much as between opposites, and historical conditions and social and institutional forces caused them to compromise. That is no longer the case. The Democratic Party is a diverse group coalition of interest groups, while the Republican Party is more of a single movement, believing mostly in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and strong defense. The current administration has largely tossed much of what used to be known as “traditional values.” The author expertly sifts through American history, citing compromises, which mostly made everyone unhappy. However, there was an era of genuine bipartisanship, roughly 1945 to 1980, when we had a national consensus and people worked together; this is what Tomasky calls an aberration of civility. Even though it was not necessarily true, people believed in the “American Way of Life.” Many causal events contributed to our current political atmosphere: the religious right’s sudden activism (against desegregation, among other issues); the Ronald Reagan administration’s dedication to deregulation, especially of banks; Newt Gingrich’s toxic attack against basic standards and norms; and the savings and loan crisis. Regarding Gingrich, Tomasky writes, “forty years later, I think it’s clear that in terms of the influence he’s had on conservatism and on both the discourse and practice of politics, he has been, for better or worse, the most influential Republican of his age.” The worst of our polarization has likely flowed from the Bill Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election. Refreshingly, Tomasky also offers “A Fourteen-Point Agenda to Reduce Polarization,” which includes a host of reasonable ideas—e.g., end gerrymandering and the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, and, intriguingly, “reduce college to three years and make year four a service year.”
Read this excellent book; it’s your civic duty.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-408-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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