Devoid of rhetoric, this evenhanded work exemplifies outstanding reportage.
A thorough investigation into how Roe v. Wade fell.
“The antiabortion movement succeeded because most people did not believe it would.” So write Dias, national religion correspondent for the New York Times, and Lerer, a Times political reporter, who interviewed hundreds of people and reported from 16 states and the District of Columbia. The authors organize the 36 chapters into four chronological parts. “The Righteous Fight” begins with the huge influence of Marjorie Dannenfelser, an antiabortion activist who viewed the movement as “a spiritual battle about what it means to be human.” The authors go on to chronicle the history of Planned Parenthood, long supported by Republicans. In the second part, “The Political War,” Dias and Lerer delineate how that support turned into opposition as the organization came to represent “the diminished power of traditional religion, gender roles, and families in American life.” In a culture where Democratic voters proved to be unmotivated by abortion, the antiabortion movement was reemerging and gaining momentum among Republicans, especially social conservatives. “For more than forty years, the antiabortion movement was David, fighting Goliath,” write the authors, “but the country had shifted, and they were giants.” The third section, “The Chessboard,” covers Trump’s election and details how he garnered support among antiabortion voters. Following his victory, liberals were caught off guard; they had no planned response to the threat against abortion rights. In “The Fate of the Nation,” the authors examine Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and how the Supreme Court became “more conservative than at any other point in modern history.” At that point, antiabortion leaders were able to flip the court. The book’s greatest strength is the authors’ comprehensive and incisive approach to explaining that “Roe did not just fall once, on June 24, 2022. Roe collapsed over a transformational decade.”
Devoid of rhetoric, this evenhanded work exemplifies outstanding reportage.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781250881397
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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