About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Elizabeth Warren
Mixed New York Magazine Persist, Elizabeth Warren’s new memoir of her life and presidential campaign, is an excellent and informative account ... The problem is that she is so deep inside that bubble she seems not to recognize it for what it was. She can paint a compelling portrait of what the inside of the Democratic Party activist bubble looked like, but shows no awareness that there is anything outside of the bubble, or even that she was inside of one ... Maybe the goal of Persist is to console and inspire her supporters, rather than conduct a serious autopsy. Still, if she wishes for her successors to fare better, Warren ought to put her famously incisive analytic skills to use analyzing her own campaign.
Naomi Klein
Pan New York Magazine This Changes Everythingmakes the case that the problem of climate change reduces to the same problem that aroused [Klein] before, and the solution entails the exact same things she has always favored ... If her logic does not make sense to you, that is because you fail to grasp Klein’s moral code, which considered corporations an irredeemably evil force tainting anything with which they come into contact ... Klein comes face-to-face with evidence that falsifies her thesis and ignores it ... The most fascinating thing about This Changes Everything is how much factual refutation of Klein’s thesis is contained within the book itself ... Klein’s fervently ideological, anti-empiricist style, and her deep skepticism of the mainstream liberals who believe emissions can be controlled without destroying capitalism, places her in odd agreement with the far right ... U.N. efforts to fight climate change have only been under way since 1988. Compare this with the notion of replacing capitalism with a radical egalitarian alternative, which has been around for a century and a half. The project does not seem to be moving forward. Waiting to limit the damage of greenhouse-gas emissions until the people can overthrow the yoke of unfettered capitalism may represent the most dangerous advice the left has come up with in a very long time.
James B. Stewart
Mixed The New York Times Book Review His account produces few new facts, nor a bold new thesis, that would dramatically alter our understanding of either. Instead, his contribution is to combine the two accounts [of investigations into Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump] into a single chronological narrative. He shows how the twin investigations turn out to be closely linked, and not just because an election pitted their subjects against each other ... his account of the Russia investigation is less satisfying [than his account of the investigation into Clinton] ... for all the suspicious patterns he reveals, for all the dots he connects, Stewart does not manage to produce a smoking gun that proves misconduct. We never learn the depth of Trump’s involvement with Russia, or whether he or Attorney General Barr applied undue pressure on the department. If these questions have incriminating answers, the people who hold them probably have no incentive to reveal them and possibly never will. What Deep State does tell us is that there are ample grounds for suspicion that Trump’s well-documented efforts to obstruct justice succeeded. To what end? That remains a mystery.
Naomi Klein
Pan The New Republic Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly ... Much of the moral weight of Klein\'s indictment rests upon the morbid pleasure her subjects appear to take in the immiseration that permits their success ... Klein repeatedly implies that there is something immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda without explaining why this is so ... Her interpretive method is an extremely crude sort of Marxist economicism ... Klein\'s model leaves little room for the non-economic varieties of conflict, such as ethnic or sectarian strife ... Almost nothing can confound Klein\'s cookie cutter ... in full defiance of everything that we know about post-war Iraq, Klein proceeds to argue that what might superficially appear to be a total failure is, in fact, the successful culmination of the war\'s purposes ... Klein\'s strength as a writer is her interest in the ground level of things ... Yet ... Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display ... Naomi Klein\'s relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.
Max Boot
Positive New York Magazine This is a decisive break with conservatism ...But the truly radical act in The Corrosion of Conservatism is its clear-eyed excavation of the movement’s history ... Boot is not so reductive as to depict Trump as the inevitable historical consequence of conservatism’s historical arc. He is able to acknowledge that Trump is both a freakish outlier and an authentic outgrowth of conservatism ... His analysis is as heretical as an orthodox Communist arguing in the 1950s that the problem with the Soviet Union began with the October Revolution.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Rave New York Magazine Harvard professors of government Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written a more foreboding analysis. Their forthcoming book, How Democracies Die, studies the modern history of apparently healthy democracies that have slid into autocracy. It is hard to read this fine book without coming away terribly concerned about the possibility Trump might inflict a mortal wound on the health of the republic ... Levitsky and Ziblatt dismiss several popular myths that may serve as comfort. Authoritarian presidents do not always or even usually act immediately — they often take few steps against their opponents in their first year in office ... It is more of an outgrowth of partisan politics than a sudden departure — partisanship taken to newer heights ... In their historic study, the most important variable in the survival or failure of a democracy is the willingness of a would-be authoritarian’s governing partners to break with him and join the opposition.