Written on behalf of the common man but best digested by policy wonks.
A legislator shares his thoughts on how to close our many digital divides.
Rep. Khanna, a Democrat, serves a Northern California district that’s home to big tech companies like Google and Apple, and while he respects their financial might, he is understandably skeptical of their libertarian rhetoric about technology alone resolving social and economic conflicts. Facebook supported his skepticism, with its promotion of misinformation and online divisiveness, not to mention its struggles with privacy. The author, who served as Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce, explores a wide range of issues tied to the tech industry: tech-job creation in rural America, racism and sexism within Silicon Valley, wage gaps, science-education funding, electric vehicles, antitrust, artificial intelligence, competition from China, and more. Khanna is a genial and clearheaded guide to these challenges, and he thoughtfully offers the occasional personal anecdote to contextualize specific problems, relating his visits to rural communities skeptical of tech interlopers making outsize promises or his own experiences with racism. Ultimately, he seeks an America that pays everyone decently, preserves communities, and protects internet users from exploitation and disinformation, and he bolsters his arguments with ideas from big thinkers such as Amartya Sen (who provides the foreword), Martha Nussbaum, and Tim Berners-Lee. The narrative centerpiece, an “Internet Bill of Rights,” is an admirable effort to codify those ideas. But the book is effectively a cascade of policy prescriptions: Dozens of sentences are teed up with phrasing like “we must,” “we need,” or “we should,” followed by recommendations regarding programs for tax credits, affordable housing, student laptops, and more. None are particularly objectionable, but eventually, the prose takes on the stiff and earnest feel of a stump speech. It’s less a book to be read than to be scanned through by politicos empathetic to Khanna’s politics—or tech lobbyists gathering opposition information.
Written on behalf of the common man but best digested by policy wonks.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982163-34-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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