Political trend watchers and history buffs alike will benefit from Edsall’s insights.
A journalist with a penchant for political economics delivers a series of sharp judgments on the conditions that made Donald Trump possible.
“The Trump era is not over yet—forewarned is forearmed.” So writes Edsall in this collection of opinion pieces from the New York Times, beginning in 2015. While it seems clear that the author is no fan of Trump’s, he takes an evenhanded approach in his analysis of events. For one thing, he notes, Trump took about the same share of White voters as did Mitt Romney four years earlier, but that White constituency was very different: “Trump won non-college-educated whites by 14 points more than Romney, a modern-day record.” Moreover, Edsall notes, the Whites Trump won were largely blue collar and lived in the Rust Belt, states that Obama had carried against Romney. Not coincidentally, Trump won among lower-income Whites, as well, who had suffered economically for any number of reasons—not least of them, Edsall observes, free trade with China, which had offshored many jobs. Given current tensions with China, that may change. In any event, the author notes that the Democratic Party once positioned itself as the champion of working-class people but has attracted and served wealthier voters—even as, Edsall observes in a typically statistics-dense op-ed, the share of gross national product held by Democratic districts had increased to 63.6% by 2019. All of this speaks to a central truth about Trump. “Because the viewpoint he represents is now so widespread, he is in one sense personally irrelevant—a symptom rather than a cause,” writes the author. One manifestation of that viewpoint is the polarization that Edsall bravely quantifies, and another is a campaign of Republican legislative efforts aimed at voter suppression, “a strategy more dangerous than the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists who sought by violent means to block the orderly transition from one president to another.”
Political trend watchers and history buffs alike will benefit from Edsall’s insights.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780691164892
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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