An impassioned, research-driven case for a return to the political center.
A debut author offers a moderate vision for the restoration of the American Dream.
Today, less than a third of Americans say they believe in the American Dream, and almost 20 percent believe that it never existed. To Libby, this is a tragic commentary on the state of America’s middle class and uninspired political leadership. In this robust volume, the author offers a new “radically moderate” vision for the renewal of American society based on data-driven, action-oriented public policy. Central to his vision is a balance between what he calls a “Strong Floor” (a socioeconomic safety net centered around strengthening education, healthcare, and “access to opportunity, work, and justice”) and its counterpart, “No Ceiling” (an embrace of entrepreneurship and “strong markets”). Per Libby, a Strong Floor will help the middle class regain a solid economic footing, while No Ceiling will drive and fund a thriving nation. Rather than calling for vague returns to bipartisanship and civility, the author argues that moderates should follow the example of the New Deal or Great Society by embracing sweeping legislative reforms; Americans are at their best, he argues, when executing a plan. The bulk of the text applies the author’s blueprint to specific topics, which he presents in chapter-length policy proposals that cover everything from infrastructure and education to immigration and national defense. Skeptics will likely note that Libby’s vision reflects a neoliberalism that enjoys a cozy relationship with Wall Street’s corporate sector while nodding toward improving safety nets for marginalized Americans, though the author argues that in an era often defined by division, “if 80 percent of the people who read this book agree with 80 percent of a radically moderate agenda, we can achieve great things together.” The author combines data-driven policy research (backed by more than 200 endnotes) with his personal experiences as a New York City-based venture capitalist. A photo album documenting Libby’s work alongside both Democratic and Republican elected officials emphasizes his lifelong connections to both political parties.
An impassioned, research-driven case for a return to the political center.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781642257014
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 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
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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