A brief but significant book that should be in the hands of anyone concerned about the nation's political future.
A notable contribution to the debate about how to reduce the appeal of “pathological populisms” while holding out hope of success in doing so.
As a leading political scientist, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and former president of the American Political Science Association, Smith’s credentials are impressive. In his latest book, parts of which were presented as part of the Castle Lectures at Yale, he explores how illiberal nationalism can be fought and reconciled to more humane, positive, and optimistic views of human potential and collective existence. In a narrative wide in perspective and rich in context, Smith makes two main points. First, he makes a case for the central importance to a people’s understanding of themselves of the stories they tell about the nations, tribes, and other groups of which they’re members—their “peoplehood.” Regarding the second, which is Smith’s freshest contribution, he argues for the importance of the kinds of stories he believes to be the most effective in energizing and sustaining a population in generous solidarity with each other against the “conservative nationalist political movements and religious traditionalists” who cling to “core, essential identities” in a changing world. “The simple, familiar siren songs of populist nationalisms” should be countered by “the development of more positive, more egalitarian, and inclusive stories of national peoplehood.” What makes a good story of peoplehood? Smith argues that it must be “expressive of [a people’s] identities and interests as well as their ideals” and “resonant, respectful” and arranged to withstand change over time. He then proposes three strong candidates for fitting stories of American nationhood and comes down on the side of Lincoln’s version of the Declaration of Independence as the richest and most enduring.
A brief but significant book that should be in the hands of anyone concerned about the nation's political future.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-22939-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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