A rousing aspirational assessment of American values.
Corporate attorney France offers a call for preserving the foundational principles of the United States.
The author’s nonfiction debut was inspired by his reflections on the hardships faced by his parents (“solid, quiet, down-to-earth, unpretentious people” who came from “humble, at times desperate, beginnings”) and grandparents, as well as on the many opportunities he enjoyed while growing up and going to school in the United States. He blames himself and other members of his generation—he was born in 1970—for not teaching younger generations to value these opportunities. “If America’s promise of freedom and democracy does not endure,” he writes, “it will not be the fault of our young people who lacked faith in that promise”—it will be the fault of older Americans not doing enough to teach young people about it. Interweaving many scenes from his own life (including moving memories of losing first his mother, then his father) with broader observations about the nature of the United States, France breaks down the country’s promise of freedom into a handful of “freedom principles,” including engagement, opportunity, responsibility, fairness, and morality. However, he also consistently warns readers about what he sees as signs of serious deterioration in American political systems—sounding a tone of warning that tempers the sunniness of much of the book, and when he asserts that “One of the parties has been infected” with an “authoritarian spirit…and the other party has become so weakened in much of the country by its ideological purity that it is incapable of building a strong national coalition in support of freedom and democracy.” Some readers may feel that this has created a situation in which many Americans care little about “freedom principles.” However, the author addresses this by condemning passivity and apathy, effectively expressing a sense of faith in American people as individuals; this gives the book a feeling of infectious optimism that makes the book a bracing read: “Ordinary Americans live life with gratitude, empathy, respect, responsibility, discipline, strength, determination, sacrifice, courage, and faith; they make America strong; they make America good.”
A rousing aspirational assessment of American values.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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