A delight for policy wonks and politicos, Rosenfeld’s insightful study of the development of political parties since World...
An analysis of mid-20th-century American political movements and the rise of an ideology-based party system that paved the way for the current state of partisan dysfunction.
It is generally understood that American political discourse is more partisan than ever: left vs. right, blue vs. red, liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican. Pundits often wistfully recall a bygone era when the divisiveness between parties was less caustic, political ideologies were harder to distinguish, and bipartisanship was routine business in Washington, D.C. However, the degradation of civility between parties was by no means an accident. As Rosenfeld (Political Science/Colgate Univ.) points out in his well-researched and fascinating study of our partisan era, the development of strict party lines along ideological beliefs was initially a product of the Democratic revolution led by President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. After World War II, political operatives began to flesh out the concept of “responsible party doctrine,” which first codified the idea of more noticeable boundaries between Democrats and Republicans in a 1950 study entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” Moving chronologically in sections divided by eras—e.g., 1945-1952, 1980-2000—the author expertly traces the development of this more parliamentary style of political organization through the postwar years and its defining moments, such as the Republican Goldwater insurgency of 1964 and the work of activist Michael Harrington to instill social consciousness into policymaking. In a scholarly but accessible text, Rosenfeld tackles the complex issues surrounding party identity, though, somewhat surprisingly, he pays little attention to contemporary politics. With an emphasis on “how we got here” rather “what do we do next,” the author’s analysis proves that the paralyzing political environment was created for a reason and can be changed.
A delight for policy wonks and politicos, Rosenfeld’s insightful study of the development of political parties since World War II is highly instructive for our current moment.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-40725-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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