Required reading for legislators and voters.
A hard-hitting critique of the American election process as timely as it is frightening.
In a slim, cogently argued analysis, legal scholar Hasen (Law and Political Science/Univ. of California, Irvine; The Justice of Contradictions: Anthony Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, 2018, etc.) points to four dangers threatening the voting process in 2020 and beyond: “voter suppression, pockets of electoral incompetence, foreign and domestic dirty tricks,” and “a rising incendiary rhetoric about ‘stolen’ or ‘rigged’ elections.” Each of these problems causes voters to distrust the fairness and accuracy of elections—the basic tenet of democracy—and may provide fuel for Donald Trump in 2020 if he refuses to concede a close election by raising “unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.” As Michael Cohen remarked in February 2019, “given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” That fear was so great before the 2016 election that the Barack Obama administration, assuming a Hillary Clinton victory, “came up with contingency plans,” calling for an oversight committee of congressional Republicans, former presidents, and former Cabinet-level officials to validate the election result. Hasen looks in depth at Republicans’ efforts to suppress voter registration and notes that as the 2020 election season began, “more states passed new laws aimed at curtailing voter registration drives in the face of high African American turnout.” Addressing the problem of technological disruptions of the voting process and manipulation of public opinion, the author urges members of the current administration to take seriously “cyberthreats to America’s power grid, critical infrastructure, and voting technology, and that they take defensive measures despite being led by a man who has proved himself more than willing to look the other way (at best) regarding Russian involvement in American elections, particularly when that involvement benefits him.” Overall, Hasen calls for “nonpartisan, professionalized election administration” and enhanced civics education about the nation’s vital “multifaceted plural democracy.”
Required reading for legislators and voters.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-30-024819-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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