An empowering but sometimes overly idealistic approach to civil conversations.
A guide to elevating political discourse in America.
Finley and Henderson, co-founders of the Great Lakes Civility Project, aim to open minds and inspire respectful political discussions in this actionable guide. This pair of “professional rivals and polar opposites” met in 2011 while covering a political conference for different Detroit newspapers. Their unlikely but enduring friendship prompted them to spread the gospel of civility, which they define as “having conversations about things you disagree on without letting hate enter into the equation.” They argue that incivility is threatening our democracy and has resulted in Democrats and Republicans being cast as “two armies competing for total dominance.” To shift the country’s course, Finley and Henderson propose four pillars of civility: “dropping assumptions,” “setting honest goals,” “active listening,” and “coming back.” They believe that most people’s opinions are formed similarly: by taking the available information and running it through a filter of values and personal experiences. Rather than viewing conversations as an opportunity to compete with or convert others, the authors advise aiming for authentic connection instead. Finley and Henderson encourage readers to start wherever they have agency and take it “one conversation, one relationship, one community at a time.” The guide offers readers an optimistic blueprint for restoring respectful political dialogue, and the book’s greatest strength is the authors’ embodiment of this approach; they truly walk the walk of the civility they preach. They include persuasive statistics throughout the book to support their arguments, and continually prompt readers to self-reflect with questions like, “What is the benefit of holding assumptions about other people and their beliefs?” However, their approach’s premise relies on all parties adhering to ground rules, such as “Everyone involved in the conversation must agree that it is a safe zone.” The book also seems to naively imply that good-faith conversations are sufficient to repair deep, structural flaws in the political system.
An empowering but sometimes overly idealistic approach to civil conversations.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9780814352182
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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