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GOING AROUND

Name: GOING AROUND
Author: Murray Kempton
ISBN: 9781644214510

SELECTED JOURNALISM

by Murray Kempton & edited by Andrew Holter ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2025

Reading Kempton reminds us that, no matter the chaos, justice and human dignity are within our reach.

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Writings by a great New York City journalist.

Throughout his career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and reporter Kempton (1917-1997) stood out among journalists. His approach was critical, and he was, writes editor Holter, “for the downtrodden, instinctively.” Of the guerrillas in 1980s El Salvador, Kempton wrote, “There aren’t all that many human creatures more attractive than some revolutionaries can be, at least until they win.” As regards police violence against civil rights activists: “It is, of course, law and order when everyone who hits anyone else is wearing a uniform.” What mattered to him lay deeper. The Civil Rights March on Washington represented “an acceptance of the revolutionaries into the American establishment” that embodied the white hope “that the Negro revolt will stop where it is.” Holter, an independent historical researcher, has gathered nearly 90 articles and editorials “from every period in Kempton’s career.” Many are outstanding. The first is Kempton’s 1936 defense of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the last outlines his instructions for his funeral. Kempton’s subjects range from labor unions and his FBI file to notables such as A. Philip Randolph, Dwight Eisenhower, and J. Robert Oppenheimer; cultural figures such as the blues singer Bessie Smith; and the less famous such as Odell Waller, a 1940s Black sharecropper who shot his white landlord during a dispute. A voice for the times, he wrote with a grace seldom encountered today. Of the conservative William F. Buckley, he said: “I did not want him to fail, except in the superficial sense of dying an old man without ever seeing the kind of America he thinks he wants.” Describing the future president, in 1989, he concluded: “We are assured that God does not make trash, which thought disposes of the impression that Donald Trump is not altogether a self-made man.”

Reading Kempton reminds us that, no matter the chaos, justice and human dignity are within our reach.

Pub Date: April 8, 2025

ISBN: 9781644214510

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Seven Stories

Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.