PositiveThe Washington PostDespite its obvious partisan bent, The Impostors seeks to do more than ridicule, shame and condemn. At its heart, the book is a plea for saner heads to rescue the Republican Party from its current morass ... At the same time, the book is clearly designed to enrage sympathetic readers. As a producer on \'The Rachel Maddow Show\' on MSNBC, Benen has a knack for comprehensive — if at times excessive — policy detail and a keen eye for intrigue and choice quotes. He has culled years of reporting to present a greatest-hits-style review of Republican intransigence, dissembling and willful ignorance ... While Benen makes a strong case that the Republicans have become a post-policy party, he comes up short in offering a compelling explanation for why this occurred ... Searching for an internal coherence, grand strategy or intellectual project is a fool’s errand, he concludes. When it comes to a post-policy party, there is no there there.
Christopher Caldwell
PanThe Washington PostAs a work of history, the book suffers critical flaws. Most important, it operates on an ahistorical premise ... Only a long-debunked caricature of pre-1960s history in which \'Americans understood themselves as they always had—as essentially a European country, displaced westward\' could support the contrast Caldwell on which hinges his argument ... Caldwell’s own evidence fails to prove the case ... Rather than build an empirical case, he relies on choice quotes from contemporary commentators, selective surveys and Google searches of the frequency of certain terms to discern what \'the majority\' believed. If the book comes up short as history, it performs a valuable service as an articulation of white grievance politics ... Caldwell excels at drawing large conclusions from small moments, and readers will find many examples of topics and hypocrisies that white people might object to ... Yet he provides no real evidence for the motivations of Trump supporters ... he argues through implication and rhetorical questions that reveal far more about his own concerns than those of the nonelite whites with whom Caldwell (Harvard College Class of 1983) sympathizes ... the real sense of entitlement comes from the people Caldwell valorizes yet leaves relatively voiceless: those who confuse human decency and empathy with liberal elitism, and who insist that those pursuing justice really have nothing to complain about.
Matt Stoller
MixedThe Washington PostStoller arranges this potentially dry story of anti-monopoly politics into a series of dramatic set pieces. From street brawls to legislative legerdemain, from fiery rhetoric to intellectual double-dealing, the book is full of virtuous populists defending the little guy against dastardly monopolists and their enablers, the \'paranoid red-baiting corporate right\' and the \'corporate left.\' Readers will learn fascinating details about the inner workings of New Deal policies, banking regulation, the conglomerate movement and the rise of the Chicago school and its intellectual assault on antitrust law. Full of righteous and riveting writing, Goliath provides an important overview of a vital history ... Yet as an argument about political economy, the book relies on melodrama and caricature, leaving much asserted but little proved ... Readers already disposed to the premise will cheer, but those seeking to understand why monopolies grew and retained such political power will be left confused ... Stoller is angry, and with good reason...His book is looking for villains, not just among the plutocrats who make a mockery of democracy but among the well-intentioned liberals, from the Clintons to Barack Obama, who pay weak-tea lip service to the dangers of corporate power even as they enrich themselves at its teat ... The result is that Goliath is punditry posing as history. Stoller writes with the cocksure confidence of someone who believes he has uncovered the secret origins of America’s woes ... Yet history is not a self-righteous morality play, and it cannot boil down to heroes and villains ... To achieve real reform, we must do more than recycle 100-year-old platitudes about shopkeepers and family farms and rescue long-dead Texas congressmen from obscurity. Rather than look for heroes in a bygone economy, we must see the past as the violent, racist and oppressive time that it was. Perhaps then we can marshal our collective power to regulate capitalism in the public interest.
Tim Wu
PositiveThe Washington Post\" And while the very term \'antitrust\' may strike many as dreadfully dry, Wu manages to make this brisk and impressively readable overview of the subject (the entire text runs about 140 pages) vivid and compelling.\
David Levering Lewis
PositiveThe Washington Post\"With meticulous attention to detail, Lewis recounts the life story of an intriguing character ... This biography is one part political yarn, one part love letter to an extinct creature: the liberal Republican ... Deeply researched and engagingly paced, the book weaves Willkie’s life into the fabric of U.S. history. With attention that borders on reverence, Lewis introduces the young populist raised in the Democratic traditions of both William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson ... In the end, though, Lewis’s subtitle — \'The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order\' — promises more than Willkie’s too-short life delivered.\
Adam Winkler
RaveThe Washington PostWinkler’s deeply engaging legal history, authoritative but accessible to non-lawyers, takes readers inside courtrooms, judges’ chambers and corporate offices as he reconstructs 200 years of case law. The book offers new takes on familiar stories ... This meticulous, educational and thoroughly enjoyable retelling of our nation’s past leads to Winkler’s argument: Citizens United, however wrongly reasoned, was not an aberration in American law. Rather, it marked the culmination of a 200-year campaign, waged by well-funded corporate elites, to bend the law in their favor ... We the Corporations leaves no doubt: America has been pro-corporate and elitist from the beginning.
