Valuable reading for voting rights advocates.
A study of the practice of shaping electoral districts to ensure electoral victory.
How did Scott Walker, who lost the popular vote for governor of Wisconsin in 2018 by some 30,000 votes, still carry nearly two-thirds of the state’s assembly and senate districts? The answer is simple: gerrymandering—and, as political scientist Seabrook observes, “one of the most egregious instances of gerrymandering in American history.” He adds that gerrymandering is a fundamentally undemocratic practice that privileges some votes over others, especially the moneyed, well-connected, White, and conservative. Seabrook traces the history of gerrymandering beyond its supposedly American origins to the English tradition of “rotten boroughs,” dating to the 13th century, with small numbers of voters attaining electoral power out of proportion to their numbers and members of Parliament propped up by corrupt measures. Things haven’t changed much over time. As Seabrook notes, the 19th century was the heyday of gerrymandering as practiced by nearly every party, so that in one Ohio election, as a contemporary observed, if the Whigs won the state by 10,000 votes, they would still earn only seven congressional representatives while their opponents would have twice as many with the same count. Seabrook shows how gerrymandering has been practiced by both major parties in recent years, with procedural road maps now followed by the GOP often laid out by their Democratic predecessors. Led by the GOP, redistricting is ongoing across the country today, largely with an eye to being sure that districts are “safe”—read: rotten—and, through disenfranchisement measures, not susceptible to being turned by unwanted minorities. In a concluding call to action, the author writes: “How much do you really know about redistricting in your state? If the answer is not much, well, that’s what the career politicians already huddling behind the scenes with teams of redistricting professionals, attorneys, political scientists, and strategists are hoping for. Democracy dies in darkness.”
Valuable reading for voting rights advocates.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-31586-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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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