An excellent, fearless work of political reportage in the face of America’s violent discontents.
A view of the MAGA-wrought culture wars as they play out in small towns.
Abramsky, author of The American Way of Poverty and The House of Twenty Thousand Books, chronicles his visits to red islands in mostly blue states, such as Sequim, Washington, which was torn apart by antinomian politics during the pandemic. The county’s medical officer tried to head off the virus by requiring masks and restricting bars and restaurants to vaccinated patrons. It worked, and in the capital, officials “extended the proof-of-vaccination mandate to include the entire state of Washington.” Her strategy earned death threats, propelled by people who make significant money spreading lies. Abramsky ranges to places such as deep-red Shasta County, California, where locals seriously discuss secession when things like virus-control mandates arrive from the faraway capital and where political action is often a reaction to progressivism, such that “a half-century-plus of social change was being litigated and litigated again on a daily basis.” It’s in small-town America where the culture wars are being fought the most fiercely: where experts come under attack, where books are banned, where school boards are taken over by people intent on dismantling public education. More than that, as Abramsky illustrates at numerous points, in those small towns, where progressives are most often a distinct minority, those wars are being fought between right-wingers and farther-right-wingers, complete with litmus tests of ideological purity. Fortunately, it seems that more moderate forces are in the ascendant. After the pandemic, writes the author, many voters returned to the center: “The majority…wanted their local public officials to be laser-focused on issues such as housing rather than going down rabbit holes about QAnon, about the evils of public health responses to a once-in-a-century pandemic, about stolen elections.”
An excellent, fearless work of political reportage in the face of America’s violent discontents.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781645030430
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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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