A sound, well-researched attempt to trace the fracturing of American politics.
A history book offers a reevaluation of the polarization in United States society and politics.
“Hunkered down at home” during 2020’s Covid-19 quarantines, Radwell grappled with reconciling the harsh realities of the pandemic and politics in the Donald Trump era with his lifelong idealized version of America as a beacon of liberty and “a land of opportunity.” As he fell into “a profound state of disillusionment,” the author dusted off history books from his college days at Columbia and Harvard and concluded there “really are two different Americas” and that the nation has been divided for centuries. Indeed, Radwell’s analysis begins in 18th-century Europe, where he finds Enlightenment thinkers divided between radicals, who sought a complete overhaul of the “rigid societal structure” of the continent’s aristocratic system, and moderates, who supported certain intellectual and societal reforms while maintaining the hierarchies. As the Enlightenment spread to America’s Founding Fathers during the Revolutionary War era, so too did its two divisions, which the book expertly tracks from constitutional debates in the 1780s through the civil rights movement and the conservative resurgence of the 20th century. The volume’s final section centers on solutions to “healing the American schism” that seriously call for a return to Enlightenment ideals, suggesting that “reasoned analysis and sound historical perspective” can overcome the “irrational political discourse that is raging at present.” Though Trump and his supporters are not spared the author’s ire, those on the left are also admonished for participating “in the mayhem that is today’s social media.” Though none of the history covered in the work will be particularly revelatory to scholars, Radwell—the former president of e-Scholastic children’s publishing—offers general readers a rigorously researched book. The endnotes and bibliography rival academic tomes, but the volume is deliberately written as “a more accessible history” for neophytes. Despite the book’s impressive breadth and engaging analysis, its emphasis on the role of White men is out of step with current social and historiography trends. Similarly, the part played by the Enlightenment in fomenting pseudo-scientific racist theories and social Darwinism is underaddressed.
A sound, well-researched attempt to trace the fracturing of American politics.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62-634861-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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