Good evidence that racism, preferably unaddressed, remains an ongoing undercurrent in America.
Accounts of three presidents who broke the iron rule of American politics: Never disturb the racial status quo.
Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University and author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate, begins with Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson. The only Southern senator who opposed secession, he disliked slavery but despised Black people. He treated them rudely, ignored widespread abuse throughout the South, vetoed congressional civil rights acts, and escaped conviction by a single vote after being impeached. Calling this a “backlash” is a weak analogy. While Northern public opinion had turned against slavery, belief in black equality remained a minority view. Blaming Reconstruction’s failure on a backlash is a stretch because Northern white support was lukewarm to begin with. Lyndon Johnson deserves praise for effective 1960s civil rights laws, but Southern malevolence cleared the way. Even conservative Northern whites were horrified at the murders, church bombing, and violence against freedom riders—all vividly covered on TV news. As a result, Johnson’s bills passed overwhelmingly, and more congressional Republicans than Democrats voted in favor. Sadly, malevolence returned following urban unrest. The beneficiary was Richard Nixon, whose law-and-order campaign and “Southern Strategy” began the country’s conservative turn, which is still with us. Impeached for offenses that might be considered small potatoes today, Nixon resigned. Supporters cheered when Ronald Reagan proclaimed the U.S. a colorblind nation where merit alone determined success. This didn’t prevent a backlash after Barack Obama’s election. He was accused of being ineligible to run for fabricated reasons and then denounced as an “affirmative action” president elected solely because of his race. The beneficiary, Donald Trump, maintained the colorblind public discourse while reviling proxy minorities: Muslims and immigrants, including legal ones.
Good evidence that racism, preferably unaddressed, remains an ongoing undercurrent in America.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780691246956
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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