An account of American greatness undermined by its relentless cheerleading.
An unabashedly patriotic look at 40 Americans who exemplify the nation’s principal virtues.
Like many others, Ruesterholz believes the United States occupies a privileged place in the history of nations, a beacon of liberty and innovation for others. “America has inspired more freedom in more places than ever before; that is a reason to be proud,” he writes. “By encouraging hard work and rewarding success, America is home to unprecedented wealth. Today, Americans are worth over $130 trillion, an unrivaled sum. We have a history of innovation and invention from airplanes to rocket ships and smart phones to search engines.” To show the greatness of the United States, he profiles 40 admirable citizens from diverse realms. In this collection, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn join activists like Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and captains of commerce like Steve Jobs and Andrew Carnegie turn up along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Ruesterholz’s choices are not always the obvious ones: Along with more famous names, he discusses the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked by terrorists on 9/11, who rose up against their attackers, showing how the “darkest of evils brought out the moral courage of seemingly ordinary citizens.” Each of the eight sections in his book focuses on a defining trait of the country: “resilience, daring, faith, fairness, sacrifice, drive, industriousness, and innovativeness.” The profiles are brief—typically only a couple of pages apiece—which tends to result in less-than-searching accounts that stick to well-known information.
Ruesterholz writes in a breezy style that evinces an optimistic and infectious good cheer: “Simply put, it is better to do and fail than to live life on the sidelines, cynically criticizing the doers.” And if the individual profiles amount to biographical snapshots, collectively they reveal the dizzying diversity of America’s luminaries; for all the author’s unconcealed partisanship for America as a whole, his apolitical cast of characters transcends ideology. A kind of kaleidoscopic history of the nation emerges through the profiles, bringing into sharp relief the challenges it has faced, including war, internal strife, and economic deprivation. At times the author’s optimism overwhelms the possibility of a more balanced, nuanced account, both of the individual subjects as well as America in general. Steve Jobs was a marvelous innovator, but he was also a man of questionable integrity, a fact his profile omits. Ruesterholz nods to America’s flaws: “No nation is perfect, but what defines America is our constant striving to be more perfect, to live up to our ideals, and to be a land with more opportunity for more people than anywhere else on Earth. In their own way, each of these forty individuals helped to advance America and enrich our culture. Anyone who can learn from and model the great attributes of these men and women will lead a successful life.” He tends, however, to gloss over his subjects’ imperfections. He rightly notes that countless Black Americans have risked their lives “to protest segregation and unjust laws and to fight for racial equality” without noting that their country established those unjust laws in the first place. The author has a right to celebrate the accomplishments and virtues of the nation—but excluding its accompanying vices paints a tableau more sanguine than true.
An account of American greatness undermined by its relentless cheerleading.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-471-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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