A helpful but uninspired primer on how women can run creditable political campaigns.
Tips on running for office from the president of Emily’s List, a political action committee aiming to elect “pro-choice Democratic women…at every level of government across the country.”
Schriock believes that any woman can become a good political candidate “if this is the right time, if you have the right motivation, and if you’re in the right situation to get the job done well.” In her first book, she offers a useful but lackluster crash course for aspiring officeholders with the help of Reynolds, the vice president of communications at Emily’s List, and a foreword by Kamala Harris, whom the organization has endorsed. Schriock covers the basics of running a campaign—from deciding whether to run to regrouping after a defeat—in a narrative that’s part self-help, part paean to Emily’s List, and part memoir of her life on political beachheads, which have ranged from her quest to become a high school student body president [in Butte, Montana] to her work as the campaign manager for Al Franken’s 2008 Senate race. The author gets off to a rocky start when she lists seven “ingredients for a successful woman leader”—e.g., “integrity,” “energy,” and “passion”—without noting that any leader, regardless of gender, should possess those traits. She’s on firmer ground when she gives practical tips on money (candidates can use campaign funds for related child care expenses) or telling “your story” to voters. Unfortunately, the text abounds with corporate bromides (“Knowing how to delegate is the key to being a successful leader”) and clichés (“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”) that may dampen would-be candidates’ enthusiasm. Readers already committed to run for office will find some nuggets of wisdom, but others can find livelier, if slightly less comprehensive, advice on campaigning in Adrienne Martini’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It and Christine Pelosi’s Campaign Boot Camp 2.0.
A helpful but uninspired primer on how women can run creditable political campaigns.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4680-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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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