An urgent message to a beleaguered party and distressed voters.
An argument for why a progressive Democrat is crucial for saving the country.
American Prospect co-founder and co-editor Kuttner (Social Policy/Brandeis Univ.; Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, 2018, etc.) offers a cogent, hard-hitting analysis of current threats to democracy, calling for the election of a progressive Democrat as president in 2020, someone “with a narrative, a manifesto, a rallying of the citizenry, and a set of policies at least as radical as those of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Like many other recent political analysts—Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny), David Runciman (How Democracy Ends), and Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains), to name a few—Kuttner sees Trump as “a sociopathic tyrant” who must be removed from office, if not through impeachment, then surely in the next presidential election. But, he asserts, “American democracy has been fraying for decades” because of “the crowding out of civic participation by money and by media, and the concentration of wealth that in turn concentrates political power.” In the last 40 years, Americans have seen their economic prospects diminish and cynicism about politics increase. Kuttner disputes the idea that Democrats need to be more conciliatory (Barack Obama’s efforts to extend olive branches was futile, he insists) and to appeal to some imagined moderate constituency. “A large majority of Democrats are substantively progressive” on issues such as minimum wage, a large infrastructure program, free public universities, and universal health care. In the 2018 midterms, “many Democrats did win as progressives, and in unlikely places.” The fight for democracy, though, will not be won simply by reclaiming the White House. The author delineates important themes for a new president: restoring America’s role “as a beacon of liberty, common purpose, and broadly shared prosperity”; rebuilding domestic industry and infrastructure; regulating capitalism; expanding the Supreme Court to override the conservative lock; ensuring economic security for future generations; offering access to health care for all; and addressing income inequality. Policy strategies, he argues, must supplement “the most difficult and urgent challenge”: “to damp down the hatreds so cynically stoked by Donald Trump.”
An urgent message to a beleaguered party and distressed voters.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00365-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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