Not likely to win over many from the other camp, but with a good amount of signal among the partisan noise.
A fierce takedown of right-wing mendacity committed in the service of a bigger lie.
It’s one thing to spin fables about the phone company killing JFK. It’s quite another to take an event within recent memory and twist it out of all recognition—to say, for instance, that the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol was just everyday tourist visitation or legitimate political protest. As Benen, a producer for the Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The Impostors, writes, any Republican who wants to make such claims has to do so without an ounce of bashfulness or self-doubt, for the public will pick up on the fearful scent and leap. “Republicans who intend to replace a factual series of events with fictitious ones must fully commit to the new narrative,” he writes, “no matter how ridiculous it is.” Thus Sen. Tommy Tuberville in a nutshell, and thus the rationale for all of the chaotic performance art on the part of a panoply of GOP leaders: Kevin McCarthy, say, who condemned the Jan. 6 attack but then, in the very next breath, declared that Trump had won the election; the refusal of Republicans up and down the ballot to commit to honoring the results of the next election (“election results are to be embraced when GOP candidates prevail”); their insistence that Trump is the victim of a weaponized Justice Department and not a con man brought to justice. The spin continues: In the current cycle, Republicans are focusing on inflation as a talking point, ignoring that the economy has grown and the unemployment rate has fallen during the Biden administration. Unabashedly one-sided, Benen paints with a broad brush, but not without reason.
Not likely to win over many from the other camp, but with a good amount of signal among the partisan noise.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780063393677
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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