A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.
Neill challenges fellow liberals to rethink their approach to Trump supporters in this third nonfiction work in a series.
“I do believe Donald Trump spreads misogyny and hate,” the author writes in this book’s introduction, adding that he also believes the president to be “cruel, solipsistic, and amoral.” With that said, the author isn’t trying to persuade readers to share his view of President Trump, but rather to ask fellow progressives to examine how their own actions may have driven nominally apolitical or moderate voters towards Trump as a candidate. Central to the book’s argument is that Trump supporters have legitimate grievances against the establishment, and to reduce their support to raw “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” is an attempt to “gaslight them.” Drawing on the antiracist work of activist Ibram X. Kendi and others, Neill emphasizes that “shaming others is not a tool for social justice,” and instead calls on his colleagues on the Left to apply their core values of compassion and understanding to those with different political beliefs. Sweeping claims that Trump supporters are ignorant or morally deficient, he says, are counterproductive to a winning electoral strategy, which he argues should reach out to people who feel marginalized, rather than further alienate them. By abandoning disillusioned men, he asserts, the Left created a vacuum that was filled by promoters of toxic masculinity. This is the latest work in a multibook series on systemic racism, whose previous volumes tackled structural racism head-on from the perspective of “a well-meaning-but imperfect-ally.” Neill, a past recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Torch of Peace Award, has a solid theoretical foundation in critical race theory and antiracist literature, and he backs his argument with a network of scholarly citations. He’s also the author of more than a dozen SF and fantasy novels, and he balances his academic bona fides (which include a master’s degree in public health from Emory University) with an engaging, well-argued, and accessible writing style, accompanied by personal anecdotes, textbox vignettes, and Spooner’s pen-and-ink illustrations.
A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313818528
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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