A stern warning to separatists that they’re likely doomed to fail.
An exploration of the possibility that the U.S. could disintegrate along ideological lines.
Picking up where his two previous books on secession left off, Syracuse University political scientist Griffiths opens with this scenario: Donald Trump Jr. declares himself the winner of the 2032 election, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does the same, and in the civil strife that ensues in the “Year of Two Presidents,” the republic shatters. But how to sort out the division of the country into Redland and Blueland, especially after Texas, once Trump Jr. sites his capital in Florida and not Houston, itself secedes from Redland, prompting Gavin Newsom to carve off the new republic of Grand California? That scenario may be far-fetched—but, Griffiths notes, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been loudly calling for a “national divorce” for a couple of years, and separatist movements are flourishing in Texas, New Hampshire, Alaska, and even, on the left, California. That division would be difficult, possibly even impossible, short of massive bloodshed, for, warns Griffiths, “treating the states as though they are either red or blue disguises the much more intermixed and purple characteristics of America.” Indeed, so divided are many places, even in rural areas, that the sole practicable maneuver might well be partition, which cost India and Pakistan more than a million dead when effected in 1947. If there were a Blueland, Griffiths adds in this evenhanded analysis, it would be small and not contiguous, making it difficult to govern; Redland would be largely depopulated and certainly far poorer than it is today, without the subsidies provided by the wealthier blue states. The Constitution offers no clear authority for secession, but that doesn’t dissuade fans of fragmentation. Yet, even while recognizing present-day discontentment and polarization, Griffiths wisely urges that “rather than divorce, counseling and working together is the better solution.”
A stern warning to separatists that they’re likely doomed to fail.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780197816257
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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