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THE CENTRIST SOLUTION

HOW WE MADE GOVERNMENT WORK AND CAN MAKE IT WORK AGAIN

A heartfelt plea to legislators and the constituents who elect them.

A longtime senator and former vice presidential nominee suggests a way to make government work.

Former Connecticut senator Lieberman draws on his 40-year career to advocate for centrism as a way to overcome insidious partisanship. “America’s freedom, security, and prosperity,” he writes, “depend on a healthy political center, a center that avoids chaotic and self-destructive extremes and instead produces progress and stability.” Reprising successes and failures, he ends each chapter with “Lessons for Centrists.” The passage of the Clean Air Act in 1990, for example, taught him that “sometimes a higher purpose can motivate great legislative accomplishments.” The act received bipartisan support because most members of Congress “could see that the result of not doing so would be thousands of premature deaths in America and the destruction of some beautiful natural resources.” As a freshman senator, Lieberman joined the Democratic Leadership Council, whose aims were “to move the Democratic Party back to the center” and “to reconnect the Party to middle-class America.” The author praises Bill Clinton for his alliance with Newt Gingrich, enabling passage of the Balanced Budget Act and Criminal Justice Reform Bill. Lieberman’s reputation as a centrist made Al Gore tap him as running mate, and Gore’s loss taught Lieberman that the Electoral College needs to be repealed. Partisanship—fueled by Gore’s defeat—deepened after the 9/11 attacks and has not abated. After losing a primary in 2006, Lieberman learned “that American politics had changed.” As an Independent, he won reelection: “Third parties,” he writes, “are a good way to disrupt the partisan duopoly of Democrats and Republicans.” He now serves as chair of No Labels, an organization founded in 2010, which endorses centrist candidates and has given rise to the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus. Centrism, he concedes, “is not a new wonder drug” but a possible step to functioning government.

A heartfelt plea to legislators and the constituents who elect them.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-63576-904-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Diversion Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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THE MESSAGE

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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