A tongue-in-cheek yet often perceptive glimpse into modern political campaigns.
Two teachers recount launching a misguided run for Congress in this campaign memoir.
“We were two average, apathetic, everyday Americans, finally driven off our respective couches by a desire to get involved and make a difference,” writes Hamrick in the book’s introduction. In this story of idealistic naïveté, readers get an insider’s perspective on Allen’s 2018 run for Congress in Texas’ 24th district and Hamrick’s efforts as campaign manager. While downplaying their connections to the suburban Dallas community they sought to represent, both Allen and Hamrick were award-winning, beloved teachers when they first launched their Democratic primary campaign. Full of level-headed, compassionate ideas that challenge the brash, reactionary tenor of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, the duo emphasizes the drudgery of 21st-century political campaigns. Written in a fast-paced, witty style reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin (except, in this story, the good guys lose), Allen and Hamrick’s account blends side-splitting anecdotes, ample cursing, and campaign disenchantment into a timely snapshot of contemporary politics. Frequently self-deprecating, the authors juxtapose Texas’ “organized, efficient, and mobilized” Republican Party, buoyed by a team of young suburbanites, with the state’s Democratic machine, which they liken to the Titanic, “post-iceberg, sinking into freezing waters while panic and chaos erupted around us.” Allen would lose the primary to perennial Democratic candidate Jan McDowell, though not for lack of trying. On one occasion, after a day of grueling campaigning, Allen discovered that he had shredded the rubber soles of his shoes. While the work’s narrative casts itself as a “buddy comedy,” whose sarcastic style may grate on the more academic readers focused solely on political insights, the authors skillfully offer pragmatic advice for would-be politicians. In primaries, for instance, where a candidate may agree with his opponent on most issues, what matters is not the “substance of what you say, but how you say it.” While an implicit indictment of the political system, the engaging book is rarely bitter and maintains a tinge of the earnest idealism that drove Allen’s campaign in the first place.
A tongue-in-cheek yet often perceptive glimpse into modern political campaigns.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780875658858
Page Count: 318
Publisher: TCU Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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