If you’re wondering why so many young people lean toward socialism, this revealing book is for you.
Of predatory capitalism and its youthful discontents.
Teddy Hoffman, one of the principals in New York Times reporter Scheiber’s morality play, worked at Starbucks for seven years after having graduated from Grinnell and won a prestigious research fellowship. As Scheiber notes, plenty of young people take such once-stopgap jobs on graduating until they find something better. “The difference for Teddy and his cohort,” he writes, is that they happened to land in these jobs at the precise moment in history when it was likely to be a radicalizing experience.” Another principal and academic standout, Chaya Barrett, worked in an Apple Store, another locus of employee dissent, the author writes, given the generational “suspicion of power merged with anger over their paychecks.” Throughout the service sector, in places like Amazon, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, this dissent found voice in a strong movement to unionize. Sometimes the dissidents won, as with Hollywood screenwriters and graduate students at a few universities, and, as Scheiber writes, even pharmacists and doctors moved to unionize, “fed up with two decades of mergers and acquisitions that had made them feel like cogs in the medical-industrial complex.” Hoffman and Barrett faced tougher opposition: Hoffman found himself slated to work fewer hours than before he began his union organizing, and continued resistance eventually led to his dismissal, and with a police escort to boot. Barrett and her Apple cohort had a somewhat better experience, but not without a bruising fight. Against this labor activism, driven by workers who were “college-educated and radicalized by tectonic economic and political upheavals,” stands the odd fact that working-class people without college degrees have tended to support the right wing, perhaps themselves radicalized in opposition to liberalism—a problem, Scheiber observes, that progressives urgently need to address by finding commonalities of class interest, of which there are plenty.
If you’re wondering why so many young people lean toward socialism, this revealing book is for you.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374610814
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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