Required reading for electoral handicappers, polling bookies and other political junkies.
American politics is nasty, ugly, messy and divisive—and that’s just the way it should be.
RealClearPolitics senior elections analyst Trende, frequently heard on the seemingly contradictory avenues of Fox News, CNN and NPR, allows that the current scene looks especially chaotic, but adds, “the type of instability we’ve witnessed recently is really the rule in American politics, whereas extended dominance of either the presidency or the House is the exception.” Thus the often-mooted predictions, usually just after an election, that one of the major parties is headed for extinction or permanent minority status is usually wrong—and though Trende doesn’t adequately allow for the possibility of gerrymandering or poll fixing, we should hope that he’s right. Voter coalitions are similarly fragile, he writes; they tend to cluster around issues, and once the issue is addressed or forgotten the coalition tends to disintegrate. That some coalitions have been killed deliberately is another matter. The author examines the slow but steady expulsion of Southern conservatives out of the ranks of the Democratic Party during the FDR administration, which he calls “a feature of the New Deal, not a bug.” Without being blatant about it, he also examines the rightward tilt of the current GOP in that light. FDR eventually had to re-recruit the Southerners; the question remains whether the GOP will have to seek out moderates to fill its tent, given the fact that in the last election the “Republicans nominated several candidates who were too stridently conservative for their states and districts, even in 2010.” The big news in the book is Trende’s observation that the Obama victory of 2008 drew on the narrowest reading of the broad-based coalition that Bill Clinton assembled in the early 1990s, and the steady withering of his base may prove harmful in 2012. Nonetheless, writes the author, “[t]his book offers no sexy prediction about what will happen next in American politics,” but instead a smart look at just how predictably unpredictable the electorate has proven to be.
Required reading for electoral handicappers, polling bookies and other political junkies.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-11646-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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