A well-researched assessment of 21st-century media.
Freelance journalist Brasunas critiques modern media in this nonfiction work.
As an American citizen living in China during Britain’s 1997 transfer of Hong Kong, the author saw firsthand the power of the media in shaping public opinion. He observes that while American media emphasized concerns for the freedoms of the island’s people, the Chinese media’s response was predictably celebratory. It wasn’t until he worked as a journalist for the Huffington Post in the United States, however, that Brasunas developed his understanding of the ways systemic issues of internal censorship and bias influence American media. The author’s experiences covering presidential campaign events with activist Ralph Nader in 2000 and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 failed to align with the national media’s coverage, which either ignored the candidates altogether or dismissed their supporters with derisive monikers like “Bernie Bros.” The author offers readers a detailed history of media manipulation throughout U.S. history, from World War I propaganda to deliberate CIA misinformation campaigns. He goes on to present case studies of contemporary news stories in which, Brasunas asserts, corporate media and mainstream journalists were complicit in burying stories or were derelict in their ethical duty to investigate an issue beyond the official government narrative, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the 2019 sexual abuse case involving financier Jeffrey Epstein. A self-described progressive, the author targets what he sees as right-wing media misrepresentation, but he is also willing to highlight failures of left-leaning outlets, such as Facebook’s and Twitter’s coverage (or lack thereof) of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. The book’s convincing critiques of the current state of American media are balanced by later chapters that are more optimistic in tone, offering readers pragmatic advice on how to consume a “Balanced Media Diet” and tips for informational literacy. Brasunas’ disdain for and distrust of media-anointed experts (including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and exhortations to “think for yourself” may echo some right-wing sentiments, but the book questions both conservative and liberal spins on most issues. Its impressive research is backed by almost 60 pages of endnotes that reference sources across the ideological spectrum.
A well-researched assessment of 21st-century media.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781667874432
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Torchpost
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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