A lucid argument for defunding—and demilitarizing—the police.
A Canadian activist ventures a defense for a controversial effort at police reform.
Public policing is relatively recent, and, writes Hudson, its origins are various: In her homeland of Canada, for instance, the North West Mounted Police, the ancestor of today’s Mounties, was founded “to wrest control from Indigenous people and support the colonization of the northwest territories of North America,” a paramilitary counterpart to the Texas Rangers and kindred groups. Meanwhile, as many scholars have noted of late, other police forces owe their origins to groups formed to oversee enslaved populations and chase down runaways. The class and racial elements of modern policing can be traced to these origins, and they shape the way policing works today, by Hudson’s lights: “Heavy police presence in Black communities guarantees Black people will be observed, arrested, and imprisoned at rates far beyond those of other races,” she writes, and this presence further reinforces the notion that “Black people are inherently dangerous.” Through “copaganda,” as she calls it, the police insist on the necessity of their existence through instruments such as a controlled news media (police reports being primary news fodder) and TV series that picture the police as beleaguered heroes. In reality, Hudson argues, the police make few people safe and oppress many, with little accountability, inasmuch as “the legal system is set up to protect police, even if they violate your rights.” Defunding the police to abolish this system is a thought experiment at present, and Hudson persuasively argues that we need not wait until all of the parts are worked out to begin putting that experiment into motion: “An unarmed civilian traffic safety service” could monitor vehicles and help correct violations: “a people-centered approach” and not a “gotcha”—“without needing to carry weaponry that can kill people several times over.”
A lucid argument for defunding—and demilitarizing—the police.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780593700815
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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