A resounding, persuasive call for a truly inclusive government of the people.
New Republic political writer Nwanevu offers remedies for an ailing American democracy.
Democracy is in a bad way: That’s the well-worn thesis of so many books of political commentary these days. It’s so, Nwanevu ventures, in part because American democracy as it is now constituted has allowed undemocratic forces to seize it. If the “best-plain English…definition is still Abraham Lincoln’s,” promoting government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then we’re far from it, owing to anachronisms such as the Electoral College and to deep swamps of misinformation. It’s cheering to note, on the latter point, that by Nwanevu’s account, most of the polls decrying Americans’ lack of political knowledge are cherry-picked: Neutral polls suggest that a majority do in fact know that, for instance, the Cold War was a “fight against communism,” can name the three branches of government, and so on. Despair about the electorate is one reason, Nwanevu suggests, that the electorate so despairs about democratic institutions. Thus, although democracy “is fundamentally about competition—the right of the people to govern themselves through fair contests where majorities win,” the minority, with a Republican congressional delegation that represents 41.5 million fewer people than the Democrats, has for decades held sway over the majority. Nwanevu proposes a number of steps to secure a truer democracy, including ridding politics of dark money, eliminating the Senate filibuster, and admitting Washington, D.C., and “willing territories” to statehood. Nwanevu frequently notes that he’s wearied by how journalism “has failed to meet this political moment.” Yet his writing is vibrant, even optimistic, animated by a clear belief that self-governance is the best kind of governance, and damn the torpedoes.
A resounding, persuasive call for a truly inclusive government of the people.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780593449929
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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