A chatty and engaging road trip into the many hearts of America.
A graduate student tours the United States talking to ordinary Americans in Bernsten’s nonfiction debut.
The author, a fan of Alexis de Tocqueville’s landmark treatise Democracy in America, embarks on a modern-day version of that visiting French aristocrat’s tour of the nation. Bernsten travels over 23,000 miles, visiting over 150 cities and towns in all 50 states, all with the aim of finding answers to some cornerstone questions: “Does American democracy still work? Can we still coexist peacefully?” These questions are born of the author’s shrewd opening contention that “The pulse of America is elusive. There is no steady beat; there is only the erratic rhythm of a people with very little shared history constantly rediscovering how to live together.” He gets in his car and sets out, and the following chapters are filled with both personal and atmospheric details of all the regions he visits: “It was night-time when I arrived in New Haven (population 129,585),” reads one such passage, “meaning that, in the darkness, I missed any nuance between Rhode Island’s wooded backroads and Connecticut’s wooded backroads”). Bernsten, a former staffer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, seeks out conversations with ordinary Americans of all political stripes in the course of his travels. This narrative conceit is perhaps a bit naive in an age when the Department of Homeland Security has documented the widespread threat of armed white supremacist groups all across the country, and at times the author’s on-the-road epiphanies feel forced and trite (“If nothing else panned out on this journey, it was worth it for this crab cake”). But Bernsten is a good storyteller and fine company on the trip, resulting in a book that may prove eye-opening to hyper-partisan Americans who need a reminder that they mostly like (and mostly are like) their neighbors.
A chatty and engaging road trip into the many hearts of America.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781739310745
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bite-Sized Books Ltd
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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