A provocative, welcome platform for wresting economic conversations away from the moneyed class.
Political journalist and Democracy editor-in-chief Tomasky delivers a strong argument for Democrats to take the lead in articulating middle-class–boosting economics.
Democracy, freedom, and economic justice are the hallmarks of America’s conception of itself. “They are inseparable,” writes the author. “It is up to the Democrats to defend all three. And they must see this as not three fights but one. It’s Republican doctrine that the market must be free and unregulated, which works supremely well “for those with the means to eat at high-end locavore restaurants or purchase the right to skip the lines at Disney World.” For the rest of society, the market goes hand in hand with Republican resistance to social spending programs such as the American Rescue Plan, which, though carrying a staggering $1.9 trillion price tag, came in at a lower percentage of GDP than Franklin Roosevelt’s “broadly popular” New Deal programs. Tomasky notes that public investment grows the economy, and it addresses both aspects of ordinary economic thought, which has both a fiscal and a moral dimension. Chalk the Republican program up to the likes of Milton Friedman, whose influence over economics Tomasky calls “deeply unfortunate” and who had strange ideas that continue to hold sway over a certain element of the political class (including the fact that “he was against national parks”). Whereas some level of inequality is inevitable in a noncommand economy, the current fiscal structure rewards the rich at the expense of the rest. The author urges that a Democratic brand of economics requires a good name, one that doesn’t include the prefix post- (“if you’re still using ‘post,’ you don’t have a movement”) and that advances the idea that “prosperity is built from the middle out”—i.e., founded on a strong middle and working class, repudiating the false notions that taxes are bad and greed is good.
A provocative, welcome platform for wresting economic conversations away from the moneyed class.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54716-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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