A broad examination that sometimes lacks focus but introduces intriguing debates.
Neill offers the first entry in a nonfiction series reflecting on racism and fallacies of American politics.
In an introduction, the author explains that his work is intended as a primer on racism, exploring its psychology, history, and “how our understanding around it has evolved.” Subsequent volumes, he says, will address the hypocrisy he claims that he’s witnessed in his “family of choice” of left-wing progressives: “Intolerance, perfectionism, purity tests, and language policing leave me feeling alienated from brothers and sisters I have embraced as allies,” he states. He organizes this book around lessons that he says he had to learn, such as reconsidering what a racist is, learning new sociological terms, and exploring tools for “course correction.” Neill examines these issues in multiple ways, using anecdotes from his own life, summaries of sociological theories, and accounts from his long history in the recovery community. “It’s hard to see the arsonists of racism is because their hideout is in our heads,” he asserts, before offering a list of logical fallacies that accompany biased thinking. In this book, he strives for an easygoing, approachable tone, even when dealing with difficult subject matter; he’s quick with Titanic jokes while employing the image of an iceberg to explain white supremacy, for example. There’s no shortage of thought-provoking material here as he carefully examines accepted notions, and his own thoughts, from multiple angles. However, as he alternates between accessible summaries of sociological theory, exploration of the parallels between addiction recovery and recognition of internal biases, and critiques of the left, readers may be unclear about what his argument is, or who it’s for. At times, it feels as if the book is trying to earn the trust of some conservatives (“I do believe Donald Trump spreads misogyny and hate….But the anger he tapped into among the American electorate was real and, I’d suggest, some of it justified”), while elsewhere, it’s clearly intended for readers on the left. Nonetheless, the book lays a foundation for fascinating discussion.
A broad examination that sometimes lacks focus but introduces intriguing debates.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313808024
Page Count: 148
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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