Accessible and urgent civic advice—hopefully, those who need it will pay attention.
The creator of the popular PoliticsGirl media brand weighs in on the countless problems with the U.S. government and political system and how to fix some of them.
Taking her cue from Thomas Paine, McGowan offers “Six American Principles” that offer Americans a way to free themselves from the tyranny of political dysfunction and rebuild a broken democracy. The first principle—America is the land of freedom—has undergirded the thinking of citizens and politicians for nearly 250 years. However, the author argues persuasively that some Americans, by virtue of race, class, and gender, are freer than others, and many of them actively use their power to oppress others. She traces the origins of this problem back to the white, land-owning, male framers and the documents they created as guidelines for the “American experiment.” To ratify the Constitution, they made allowances for slavery, granted smaller states equal power in the Senate, and counted African Americans as three-fifths of a person. If racism, inequality, political gridlock, and corruption have overwhelmed the body politic, it is because they grew out of these exclusions and exceptions. The other principles McGowan brings forward—for example, that everyone should have the opportunity to rise and that the law applies to every single citizen, regardless of status—will remain ideals for as long as these issues go unresolved. She further observes that adherence to long-standing political traditions, including lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, must be reconsidered, even if that means amending the Constitution, which the framers intended as a “living document” for a developing nation. For true change to happen, American citizens must put aside their complacency and vote while actively holding those in power accountable: “The question is: Are we willing to work for it?”
Accessible and urgent civic advice—hopefully, those who need it will pay attention.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668066430
Page Count: 240
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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
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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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