Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.
Deep state, shmeep state: a spirited rebuttal to the canard that federal civil servants are nest-featherers up to no good.
“The fact is that federal employees go to work every day with the explicit job description of making the lives of everyday Americans better.” So writes W. Kamau Bell, one of the writers drawn into this Washington Post project to explore the federal workforce and the things its members do in their daily labors. As volume editor Lewis notes, the Post series, although about eight times larger than the usual feature, saw a fourfold increase in readership—perhaps not so surprising, given that D.C. is a company town, but noteworthy in that the series painstakingly showed readers the myriad ways in which government is not the demonized bugaboo of Reagan and Trump supporters. What do the people of the Department of Agriculture do? Lewis asks and answers: “They preserve rural America from extinction, among other things.” Lewis, best known for his 2003 book Moneyball, profiles a mine inspector at the Department of Labor who, committed to making mining safer, developed protocols and technologies such as the “stability factor” to do just that, even though “industry executives…made it clear…that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.” The National Cemetery Administration, writes Casey Cep, may be unknown, but its 2,300-odd employees “bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members each year” while tending the graves of more than 4 million veterans. Dave Eggers visits the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is quietly asking questions about life in the universe, sending out spacecraft and monitoring the heavens while employing some of the best minds in the world—about a third of them women. All the contributions similarly press the point that the government’s work is useful—and no one else but government workers are likely to do it.
Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798217047802
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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