Packed with interesting, useful information, but ultimately lacking cohesion.
A political consultant’s thoughts and predictions regarding America's increasing Latino population.
A self-proclaimed “political data guy,” Madrid, co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, has amassed compelling statistics on voters generally and Latino (the term the author prefers over Latinx, “a political term, not a community term”) voters in particular. The author attempts to synthesize decades of experience in service of understanding and engaging Latino voters, who have been ignored or taken for granted, misrepresented, and, perhaps most critically, left uncompelled by either of America’s major political parties to participate in the civic process. The first half of the text is a sort of political autobiography, outlining Madrid’s Republican identity forged in the Reagan era, his campaign work in his home state of California and on the national level—which reached a crescendo during George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign—and a defection from the GOP in the Trump years. Both Madrid's professional rise and his partisan disenchantment demonstrate his enthusiasm for the political process and his fervent belief in the power of the Latino community as a voting bloc. He issues calls to action for both Democrats and Republicans to acknowledge and court this power with aspirational messages and policies that address the needs of a rapidly assimilating group. However, chunks of text spent on details of political ad campaign purchases and quotes by the author in the press would have been better used fleshing out the meaning, context, and implications of Madrid’s data. The author struggles to convincingly support many of his most potentially insightful points—e.g., Latino voters’ rightward shift, ideas for engaging Latinos in swing states, and their relative prioritization of cultural or economic issues. Madrid’s detours stifle the potential for deeper analysis that he is in such a distinct position to provide.
Packed with interesting, useful information, but ultimately lacking cohesion.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781668015261
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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