Prognostication is always a risky business, but Greenberg makes a good case for a near-term future in which tea partiers and...
If demography is destiny, then it would appear that the Republicans are in big trouble.
Democratic pollster Greenberg takes up the argument he began to unfold in America Ascendant (2015): The GOP is fighting a war, mostly on the cultural front, that it cannot hope to win, its “original sin” being the much-in-the-news war on women’s rights to control their own bodies. This culture war is being waged by a bloc of evangelical states that are ever less important in the electoral mix, in large part because millennials, who tend to be socially liberal, are moving to the big cities, depopulating the countryside, and turning that culture war into an urban-vs.-rural battleground that the moribund white majority will eventually lose. Try as it might, the Trump administration cannot change the fact that the foreign-born populations of the U.S. is growing, with 12 million foreign-born migrants swelling the population of the nation’s cities and suburbs. Given that “every religious denomination is coping with drops in the number of those who are religiously observant,” and given that younger people generally support gay marriage and multiculturalism, it’s the GOP’s world to lose. That said, as Greenberg notes, there’s still the business of messaging: The Democrats, he argues, have to change their notion that government can be a ladder to lift the poor and instead hammer on the more robust point that American workers need a level playing field. “Working people are no fools,” writes the author, and they’re now seeing the effects on their paychecks and lives of tariffs, cuts in health care and social services, and the like. Winning the blue-collar white vote won’t be the easiest thing, Greenberg allows, but Trump lost significant numbers of those voters between 2016 and 2018—and 2020 is coming up fast.
Prognostication is always a risky business, but Greenberg makes a good case for a near-term future in which tea partiers and Trumpies will be largely irrelevant.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31175-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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BOOK REVIEW
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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