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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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