A sound, if eclectic, take on America’s sociopolitical woes.
A solutions-oriented book offers a critique of the 21st-century’s political status quo.
It’s not difficult to “find imperfections in all walks of American life,” Zecola notes in the first line of his work, “from its rules, to its leaders, to its economic policies and so forth.” Divided into six parts that examine the disconcertingly imperfect state of America’s rules, leadership, policies, markets, industry, and future, the volume paints a bleak picture. Though the six elements analyzed are different, they are all interconnected in the author’s convincing account because their problems stem from an anti-democratic “unbalance” in American politics. The constitutional allotment of influence, for instance, gives small, mostly White and rural states “the power to block the will of the majority of the people.” Similarly, the book contends that Evangelicals, a demographic minority, have “orchestrated a jury-rigged Supreme Court that has eliminated 50 years of women’s rights, restricted gun control, and restricted measures to curb pollution.” And while offering well-reasoned solutions to a myriad of issues, including providing career advice to the unemployed and those entering the workforce, the work presents an ultimate solution that boils down to the need for a renewed democratic ethos whereby “voters become engaged” and retake control of the mechanisms of government. Although the volume’s idealistic final answer may come off as Pollyannaish, its critiques are grounded in a dishearteningly realistic approach. Many of its sharpest barbs are reserved for the religious right (whose “anti-abortion viewpoint is based upon nothing more than a misunderstanding of the reproduction process”) and Donald Trump (who “turned lying into an art form”). But this is not simply a partisan polemic. Democrats, for instance, are criticized for their “out-of-control” spending as well as their general apathy toward protecting democratic norms from conservative incursions. At 153 pages, the book offers a concise critique of the existing state of America with a well-informed, accessible writing style reflecting Zecola’s background as a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and government official. But the volume’s lack of citations may disappoint readers looking for a more scholarly approach.
A sound, if eclectic, take on America’s sociopolitical woes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 153
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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