A memorable, necessary contribution to the national conversation on gun violence.
A meditative history of mass murder by gunfire.
Freelance journalist McGraw begins in 1966, when a former Marine climbed a tower at the University of Texas and began firing. When he was finally brought down after murdering 17 people, he was said to have had a brain tumor—though that did not prevent the shooter from amassing an arsenal and planning his spree. Of all the mass killings since—Columbine, Christchurch, Parkland, the list goes on—there are, notes the author, only a few points in common. Though assaults by gun are fewer than by fists or knives, “when an active shooter—and it is most often a male—does get his hands on a semiautomatic rifle, the results are catastrophic.” The string of catastrophes that McGraw chronicles ends with a shooting from a Las Vegas hotel window “a hundred feet higher than the Texas shooter” in which an astonishing 471 people were hit with bullets and 102 died. That shooter—McGraw is scrupulous, with a couple of willful exceptions, about not naming names, denying killers the publicity they crave—was not, strictly speaking, insane. He may have been evil, but that is an amorphous, fairly useless concept that helps remove agency. What can be said about the killers in general is that they’re psychologically troubled and make their troubles known before they act, oftentimes only to be ignored. One young man who slaughtered 26 people, many of them schoolchildren, was diagnosed with numerous mental health issues, yet his mother, a gun enthusiast, bought him weapon after weapon. She was the first to die. The ease with which such guns can be acquired (2 million have entered the market since the Newtown massacre) is one of many seemingly intractable problems. That, along with a would-be killer’s sense of entitlement, contributes to a legacy of incomprehensible violence, of which McGraw writes, with grim poetry, “There is no silence on earth deeper than the silence between gunshots.”
A memorable, necessary contribution to the national conversation on gun violence.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1718-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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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