A bracing call for a crucial bit of reformation in American politics.
A reformist jeremiad looks at the current domination of U.S. political parties and declares a plague on all their houses.
For his nonfiction debut, Peterson has crafted a cobweb-clearing call to arms, one that centers on the long-debated American public issue of election reform. But whereas most such proposals focus on tightening term limits or reining in the influence of special interests, PACs, and powerful lobbyists, the author takes aim at much bigger game: the political party system itself. He rightly reminds his readers that the Founding Fathers abhorred the idea of political “factions.” According to Peterson, these parties, having started as petty nuisances, have grown over the centuries into great evils that have robbed the American people of their sovereign right to nominate for public office any candidate they choose, regardless of party affiliation. Peterson’s book is more pertinent than ever, since all of his readers will retain vivid memories of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which some lifelong Republicans felt they had to vote for the man who won the nomination to remain loyal to their party. Meanwhile, millions of Democrats seeking to select their own unlikely candidate—an outspoken socialist—were thwarted by the very party machinery they were hoping to strengthen and ended up with a choice some believed was ethically compromised. The author gives a clear and fast-paced account of party history in America. He then deftly lays out the case that party hacks have exploited a loophole in the Constitution that unintentionally allows them to flourish. Finally, he presents a radical solution: a new Constitutional amendment, the 28th, designed to close that loophole. His prose is straightforward and convincing, and although he insufficiently addresses the lifeblood on which political parties survive—the staggering amounts of money provided by the special interests and PACs, which likely own more than enough U.S. senators to guarantee a new amendment will never happen—his case is tremendously thought-provoking.
A bracing call for a crucial bit of reformation in American politics.Pub Date: April 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-6292-6
Page Count: 282
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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