A must-read for anyone who cares about educational—and societal—reform.
An award-winning journalist examines how higher education has unwittingly fostered the divides plaguing American society.
Before the end of WWII, college had been a “narrow pathway to success for the pampered elites,” writes Bunch, national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of Tear Down This Myth. However, postwar economic expansion and government programs like the GI Bill transformed colleges into places where less-privileged citizens could climb toward the prosperity their parents did not have. Bunch shows how the explosive growth in higher education, intended as a "public good," would eventually lead to the fracturing of American society. The liberal arts curriculum—and the leisure time that went along with student life—gave rise to a generation of young liberals who, at institutions like Berkeley and Columbia, protested against their imperfect democracy. The author suggests that this led to an inevitable political backlash from conservative politicians who questioned government/taxpayer support for higher education. It also gave rise to “credentialism,” the idea that a college degree was necessary to obtain a good job. By the 1980s, government policies forced families to bear the ever increasing cost of a college education—especially through loans—and the desire for a diploma transformed into a kind of “rough show-us-your-papers demand for clinging to the middle class.” Circa 2020, the university system, which caters to the wealthy and turns students of modest means into "indentured servants of debt,” has become an often hated symbol of elitism among what Bunch calls the “Left Behind.” In this consistently compelling, thought-provoking book, the author is quick to point out that no easy fix—e.g., cancelling student loan debt—exists. However, Bunch suggests that reform should include a national service like Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that targets qualified high school graduates to receive quality employment while fostering “a broader sense of shared purpose.”
A must-read for anyone who cares about educational—and societal—reform.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-307699-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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