Category: Reviews

Books, Movies, specific events.

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Book Review: Citizen

Each end of year holiday season I find a book by or about one of our presidents and read it as a gift to myself. Since that slugabed Barack Obama hasn’t published his second book of presidential memoirs (volume one was published in 2020), I settled for Bill Clinton’s post-presidency memoir Citizen: My Life After the White House published Nov. 19 this year. There are plenty of reasons to read Clinton.

My position about Bill Clinton and this book is that since he survived heart disease and a case of sepsis he ought to write a post-presidency memoir so historians can benefit from the information gathered herein. Indeed, there is granular information about the accomplishments of the Clinton Foundation. The first two parts of the book cover those years in detail lest we forget Bill and Hillary Clinton were do-gooders, all over the world. Let’s face it, though. Bill Clinton is a political animal and the third part of the book, “Politics, Rewriting History, and Reviving the Foundation in a Still Uncertain Future,” in which he discusses politics, is what many were waiting to hear.

Clinton points to Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America as the source of today’s divisiveness in society. When Republicans won the 1994 midterm elections and installed Gingrich as Speaker of the House, it was he who changed our politics to be more confrontational. From shutting down the government twice, to welfare reform, to a capital gains tax cut, to impeaching Bill Clinton as president, Gingrich made it so our politics would never be the same as it was. We are still suffering from the conservative detritus in his wake in national politics. He supported Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Important in Citizen is Bill Clinton’s account of Hillary Clinton’s political life through her run for the presidency in 2016. While their story is familiar, he makes a strong case for what happened and why. It is a story infrequently told in major media outlets and worth reading here.

Clinton also reviews some of his major accomplishments, like the Crime Bill and the Family and Medical Leave Act. There is no shortage of moments when he honked his own horn about his many accomplishments as president, including job creation, converting the budget deficit into a budget surplus, and connecting more schools to the internet. Clinton makes a solid case that his administration did many things that benefited middle-income workers.

Beginning around 2016, Clinton received criticism from the left that his signing the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 welfare reform bill were actually him (and Congress) caving to the far right. He defends himself rationally as the “explainer in chief” is wont to do. It is important to recall that in the end, Clinton was one of the good guys among politicians and advanced Democratic causes.

I recommend reading Citizen: My Life after the White House by Bill Clinton. It is important to know the history of Democratic politics and Clinton was in the middle of it.

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Book Review: The Hidden History Of The American Dream

I understand what Thom Hartmann wrote his new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class — And How to Rescue Our Future. However, the book is less likely written for a boomer like me than for millennials and younger people who did not live through the Reagan Revolution. Hartmann said as much in an email:

“I wrote this book mostly to Zoomers, Gen-Xers, and other younger-generation Americans who don’t understand how we got a widespread middle class in the first place (it was FDR’s government intervention in the so-called “free market”) or why it shrank from two-thirds of us when Reagan came into office to a mere 43-47 percent of us today (Reagan’s 1981 mission was to gut the middle class to “preserve stability”).

When I came of age after finishing graduate school, Ronald Reagan was president and despite an advanced degree, military service, and being a white male with the privilege that means, the American Dream was the stuff of legends rather than something attainable. In his book, Hartmann explains the history of how the Middle Class came to be and what happened after Reagan was sworn in as president. The idea of an “American Dream” is still relevant, he said in a recent interview. His message is one of hope for restoring the American Dream, economic opportunity, and a strong Middle Class.

What makes this book relevant now is the fact that in the November 2024 election, the country is facing a choice between the Democratic Republic upon which we were founded and a rich person’s paradise where privatization of government functions and economic deregulation are the norm.

On Sept. 17, the author interviewed Hartmann about his new book. Click here to listen to the 27-minute interview. You will be glad you did. Hartmann discusses his view of the American Dream, the impact of Reaganism, K-12 and higher education, right to work, and more.

Thom Hartmann is a four-time winner of the Project Censored Award, a New York Times bestselling author, and America’s number one progressive talk show host. His show is syndicated on local for-profit and nonprofit stations and broadcasts nationwide and worldwide. It is also simulcast on television in nearly 60 million U.S. and Canadian homes.

To buy a copy of The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class — And How to Rescue Our Future, click here.

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Book Review: The Art of Power

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi is a solid read from a person at the center of American politics since first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1987. In a time when the average American adult finishes just over five books per year, Pelosi’s book is perfect. It is an easy read, about timely topics, and general enough to interest an average reader through to the finish.

Pelosi emphasizes the book is not a memoir. It is the story of her time as the 52nd Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. It is also the story of Democratic accomplishments during the last 37 years. We Democrats don’t tell our story in clear, measured prose often enough. More books like this are needed.

While I lived through this period as an adult, Pelosi pulls a narrative together that not only rings true to the times, it leaves out much partisan drivel a lesser writer might include. It brings focus on important events and legislation from her unique platform.

Some say Nancy Pelosi is a lightening rod in politics. What I say is she is a person with an accomplished life who wrote a book well worth reading.

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Book Review: Minority Rule

A decent history of American politics in the post-Obama era has yet to be written. One can’t rely upon any of the conservative principals to author one, because they have been drinking at the well of minority rule for too long. A Trump autobiography? He didn’t even write The Art of the Deal.

Enter Ari Berman’s new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People–and the Fight to Resist It, published in April. It provides a well-researched and relatable history of an issue that has been at the heart of modern conservatism since Pat Buchanan worked in the Nixon White House.

In a 1995 National Press Club address, Buchanan, then a presidential candidate, said, “If present trends hold, white Americans will be a minority by 2050.” This underlying fear mongering became endemic to Republican politics and drove the ascendancy of the 45th president. Irrational fears the United States would transform from a First World Power to Third World status drove conservative voters to the ballot box.

In my reading of books about the rise of Donald Trump as president, Berman is the first author to tell a clear, coherent, and relatable story of that time. Minority rule is at the heart of current Republican policy and behavior and Berman lays it all out for the reader.

While the 1965 Voting Rights Act broadened access to the ballot, conservative white folks were aghast and feared they would become a racial and political minority. During the Johnson administration, an emphasis on immigration of whites was transformed to a broader band of global populations. Enter Trump to both fan the racist, anti-immigrant flames, and get elected as a supposed fire fighter for the fires he started.

Berman outlines the constitutional and legal structure that enables minority rule in the United States. The conduct of the U.S. Census, having two U.S. Senators per state regardless of population, the growth of the filibuster, the electoral college, and drawing political districts in a way that disenfranchises non-white voters, all play a part in enabling minority rule, according to Berman.

While it may sound easy to keep the U.S. Census above politics, it was politicized during the 2020 census by the administration. Having two U.S. Senators, combined with the filibuster enables senators representing a minority of the population to set policy and block majority-favored laws they don’t like. Political gerrymandering, especially in states like Wisconsin and Michigan entrenched minority rule and blocked attempts for political districts to represent the people in the state. There is no magic bullet to fix any of these issues. Entrenched, minority rule makes it more difficult.

In Minority Rule, Berman outlines the role of The Heritage Foundation’s sister organization, Heritage Action, in our politics. Heritage Action is a 501(c)4 nonprofit conservative policy advocacy organization founded in 2010. The Heritage Foundation was restricted from advocating policy, so they created this offshoot, which has become one of the most powerful political lobbying groups in the nation. Iowa is one of the states where these dark money groups have been active.

Ari Berman gets a thumbs up for this book, and I recommend you read it yourself. Minority rule is endemic to the problems of politics in 2024. Berman helps us get a grip on it. He also provides hope the electorate can address the problem and embolden democracy going forward. He presents evidence such a movement has already started.

I also recommend Berman’s previous book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

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Book Review: Attack From Within

We need information that will help us cope with the 2024 political campaigns and facilitate Democratic wins. Barbara McQuade’s new book has the potential to do that.

McQuade is a law school professor and legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. A former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, she was appointed the first female in that position by President Obama. She possesses legal bona fides. She also co-hosts a podcast called Sisters In Law.

She is one of several combination authors/lawyers/talking heads/podcasters I follow. Her new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, comes at a perfect time for this presidential election year. It is relevant, engaging, and necessary. What is it about?

In part, the book is an explainer. McQuade pulls commonly known information from the media ecosphere and relates it to the concept of disinformation, demonstrating the potential and real consequences for American Democracy. She presents a coherent narrative that includes how disinformers gain power, disinformation tactics, why disinformation works, the danger of emerging technologies, and more. For those parts of the book alone it is worth reading.

What I found most engaging was the chapter “We Alone Can Fix It: Proposed Solutions.” Dealing with disinformation and misinformation can be daunting. McQuade compares this task to the moon shot during the Kennedy administration and wrote:

The tandem threats of authoritarianism and disinformation can seem overwhelming, but we as a nation have solved big problems before. The stakes for democracy are simply too high to ignore them or surrender to despair. Unless we take action, democracy in the Unites States seems destined to fail, and our sovereignty as citizens will perish with it.

Attack From Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade, page 249.

In this chapter, McQuade turns from describing the problems with disinformation to potential solutions. Free speech protections are not absolute in the United States, she said. We should be seeking regulatory solutions to misinformation and disinformation rather than simply banning content. She asserted this can be done without implicating censorship concerns. That may seem like a difficult needle to thread, yet it is the approach taken by other western governments like Germany and the European Union.

Another idea is related to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. I have frequently bemoaned loss of enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan, yet there may be a different solution. “Making online media companies legally responsible for the content on their platforms would force them to remove posts that endanger the public,” McQuade wrote. This issue is at the heart of the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri for which the high court heard oral arguments on March 18. This approach is not without problems. A discussion is needed to discover a way to balance stripping some protections from legal liability while continuing to make reforms in how online content is regulated. It doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. My sense is the high court will decide this case on narrow grounds and throw it to the legislative branch of government to be addressed. The days of having discussions like these at the Supreme Court, as was done in deciding Roe v. Wade, are over with the Roberts Court.

My advice? Secure a copy of the book, by buying it or asking your public library to get a copy, and read it. I’m missing some things in a short book review, but believe me, you are going to want it all from Barbara McQuade.

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Book Review: The Wide-Brimmed Hat

I’m cautious when I write the first Goodreads review of a book that has been published for more than 20 years. That I read The Wide-Brimmed Hat at all is attributable to finding a first edition copy in a thrift shop or used book sale, and that it was written in and largely about Iowa and Midwestern values. I knew Susan Kuehn Boyd by name yet had no prior knowledge of her as an author before seeing this book.

The most interesting part is excerpts from Boyd’s May 1970 diary during the anti-war protests at the University of Iowa where her spouse Willard (a.k.a. Sandy) was president. I was a senior in high school that year and what I knew about that period was there were protests and the university closed early for the academic year because of them. Protesters occupied the president’s office in May 1970.

In her diary, Boyd shows a privileged life in the university community. During the protests, she and her family moved out of their home for security reasons, attended group luncheons as usual, and ate gourmet food, all well removed from main protest actions. She mentions both her spouse and D.C. Spriesterbach, who both have written about May 1970 in their books. Susan Boyd’s narrative adds another layer of perspective and I’m thankful to have found it.

The stories, play, and poetry that comprise the main part of the book are better suited to magazines like Mademoiselle which published some of her work. The book was readable and if one enjoys the kind of stories anthologized in short story collections, there is something here for you.

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Book Review: Letters from the Country

It was a long time getting to Letters from the Country by Carol Bly. My copy is a discard from the Lake County Indiana Public Library where I picked it up from a used book shelf. We moved back to Iowa in 1993, so the purchase was more than thirty years ago. Attracted by the idea of letters from southwestern Minnesota, where my family bought land from the railroad in 1883, the book failed to stand up to time when I recently read it. If its insights and comments were relevant when it was written in the 1970s, such relevance escapes the reader in a time of internet connections, processed food, sports utility vehicles, and 24/7 right wing talk radio.

There are some truths buried in this time capsule of a book, particularly about how rural people interact with each other. It is a learned protocol of avoiding difficult things in life. Things like problems that have complex solutions that are not obvious, or telling someone “thanks for sharing ” immediately after they spill their guts about something intensely personal that affected them greatly. Away from the distractions of large cities, there is a sense that people have to live with each other and therefore don’t tend to burn any bridge with someone they might see in the neighborhood, or at the convenience store, library, or American Legion. For the most part, this means avoiding talk about politics unless one knows the politics of everyone in the room.

People don’t take well to being told what to do or how to live their lives. Bly’s book is full of that and partly, it’s why it seems outdated. Times have changed. She writes about bringing intellectual pursuits from the city to rural areas, which is a noble idea. Today, folks just get into their SUV and drive to Chicago to see the latest exhibition at the Art Institute. Or they fly to New York to see what’s on Broadway. For the time being, arts and the humanities are taught in rural public schools. The annual cycle of K-12 school musical, dramatic, and literary productions are part of the fabric of rural society. The direction our politics is heading may remove these topics from curricula in the near future to focus on skills needed to get a job, raise children, and get along well enough to not rock the boat of social mores.

Some of the letters mention the frequency with which rural folk write their congressman. Not writing is a sign of a decent level of satisfaction in the community. That’s why, Bly wrote, rural folks don’t write that many letters. If current elected officials seem out of touch with reality, it’s not because they don’t know what’s going on with citizens. They choose to address their concerns while adding a layer of indoctrination in the new ways of a national conservative culture. Why talk about poor air and water quality — real problems in Iowa — when citizens can be scared by tales of bogeymen laden with fentanyl illegally crossing the border with Mexico. The latter pays a political premium.

I didn’t dislike Letters from the Country. I do want to say more than “thanks for sharing” to the author. What I will say is it is good to read Bly’s analysis of what’s wrong with country folk and their way of life. Maybe it just needs updating. That would be a fit project for someone to take as long as it is not me.

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Book Review: Democracy Awakening

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson is a must read for anyone following the contemporary discussion of conflict between the liberal consensus and movement conservatism. If you don’t know what those two things are, Richardson takes the reader through how they came about, beginning with the founders. She explains why the discussion is important to American democracy. The liberal consensus has been under assault since Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in 1981. To a large extent, conservatives have been successful in beating back the liberal consensus.

The benefit of reading this book is it takes political things we mostly know about and frames them in a narrative that both explains them from Richardson’s singular perspective and makes sense. To the extent she is preaching to the choir of readers who already understand the liberal consensus, how it came about, and why wealthy Americans are dismantling it, the book stopped short of expectations. There could be more calls to action to satisfy us. However, the important aspect of the book is that most modern adults haven’t lived through the Reagan years and their aftermath. It serves as a primer for millennials and more recent cohorts who now comprise the nation’s largest living adult generations. The book is not directed to boomers, although we will read it, but to younger Americans. They will have to take action to defend or re-invent the liberal consensus simply because my generation is dying off.

Part 2, The Authoritarian Experiment, is an important narrative about the rise of Donald Trump and a popular history of his administration. Many words have been written by others about this, yet what I found lacking in other accounts, and Democracy Awakening addresses, is a basic timeline and explanation of the shit show that was the Trump presidency. Many people stuck their heads in the sand from the November 2016 election until the present because they found it incredible that Trump’s outlook and minions would prevail. Indeed, with the election of Joe Biden as president, forces of authoritarianism were held back.

Democracy Awakening was a fast read, I finished in four days. I recommend it to anyone concerned about the future of our democracy. It seems unlikely the book will be the definitive history of that period. At the same time, it is what we need to inform our political action during the 2024 election cycle and beyond.

I also recommend subscribing to Richardson’s daily substack, Letters from an American. It is a blend of history, journalism, and analysis of current events. It is one of the sane bits of writing coming out of the explosion of disinformation in our media sphere.

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Book Review: Presidents of War

The Mason City and Urbandale school districts have both been in the news because of their efforts to comply with the new Iowa law which restricts what school children can read in class or in the school library. While this is a specific initiative driven by a small number of conservative groups, it seems appropriate to ask what should adults be reading? I submit it is books like Michael Beschloss’ 2018 history Presidents of War.

Presidents of War is a history of the use of presidential power conducting our nation’s wars beginning with the War of 1812 through the Vietnam War. Beschloss points out repeatedly our war presidents did not closely follow the intention of the framers of the constitution or the words in the document. They took liberties to accomplish their various objectives, some of which were needed, some political, some deceptive, and some flat-out ill-advised. Even the revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt weighed political considerations in his conduct of World War II.

In his review on Gates Notes, Bill Gates brought home why the book is important:

The richest insights for me came from the fact that the book’s broad scope lets you draw important cross-cutting lessons about presidential leadership…

[…]

Beschloss didn’t unearth much new material about any of these wars. But looking at each president and each conflict with a similar lens is what makes the book a worthwhile read.

Gates Notes, Bill Gates, May 20, 2019.

The barrage of misinformation and outright lies in our daily lives is non-stop. The technique is to drop a factoid, then pivot to an argument that has a political or commercial point to make. The point often isn’t rational or based on the asserted fact. It is hard to believe folks will summarize the complexity of World War II , or any of our wars, in a brief social media post to perpetrate a lie. Yet they do. We should be able to agree to leave World War II out of the pitch to buy life insurance. If we can’t, society has bigger problems.

Beschloss spent more than a decade writing this book. In the acknowledgements he wrote parts of the book were 40 years in the making. The reason to read Presidents of War is it equips us to deal with misrepresentations and lies in social intercourse. “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Winston Churchill said in a 1948 speech in the House of Commons. By presenting historical truth in the book, Beschloss enables us to call foul when someone misrepresents it.

In our political discourse, we spend a lot of time assessing our presidents. Presidents of War, and others like it, give us incontrovertible information about which presidents messed up and which didn’t. We should consult such information before blurting things out about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and others like a loose cannon.

One aspect of Michael Beschloss’ package is he is active on social media and a historical consultant to news organizations. Room Rater consistently gives him a 10/10 for his presentation of self in video commentary. I mean, those are not really credentials we used to consider. As a historian, he became a participant in popular culture and this contributes to the book being readable and understandable. Presidents of War demonstrates proficiency in historiography as well as being relatable.

School boards are banning books and that makes it important for parents to be active readers. If you wanted to start reading again, or just need a good next book, President of War would be a great starting place.

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Book Review: The Hidden History of American Democracy

Is democracy the default state of humanity? In The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, author Thom Hartmann presents the case that democracy is our default state, overcome only by the intrusion of dictators, popes, and kings using the power of great wealth, control of media, or the force of arms and technology. He explains where society has gone astray and what we can do to restore democracy.

The Hidden History of American Democracy is the ninth volume in Hartmann’s Hidden History series. Like its predecessors, it is accessible and easily readable, especially for readers immersed in the issues it covers. Hartmann creates a narrative grounded in historical documents yet seems fresh, and modern in its interpretation. The first two parts of the book dispel myths about democracy and the meaning of our constitution. The rest of the book frames the modern war on democracy and regulated capitalism; outlines a 21st Century democracy agenda; and presents a call to action.

The United States is not a Christian nation. Although Christianity was introduced in North America by European settlers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, and has experienced periodic revivals, it did not appear to take. The founders did not envision the newly formed country as Christian. They took precautions to avoid affiliation of the government with religion. Author of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution Thomas Jefferson studied the Bible yet was decidedly not Christian. In fact, the US Constitution never explicitly mentions God or the divine. In this book, Hartmann creates a narrative about the founding using Jefferson’s own experiences with the Cherokee and other indigenous people, depicting American democracy’s indigenous and broadly based intellectual roots.

While the US Constitution isn’t strictly based on the Iroquois Confederacy, it does have some elements in common with it. The greater impact of Native Americans, however, was in helping to shape the thinking of Enlightenment thinkers from Spinoza to Locke to Montesquieu to Jefferson.

Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of American Democracy.

Here in Iowa, people refer to the US Constitution as if they read it. What they say and appear to believe about it doesn’t match the text. Not only do citizens believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation, they superimpose misguided characteristics on the Constitution regarding gun ownership, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Electoral College, the branches of government and more. In part two of the book, Hartmann takes apart these cultural myths in an effort to return us to a basic democratic outlook from before some were led astray.

The high water mark for post World War II democracy may well have been the election of Ronald Reagan as president. 60 percent of middle class Americans lived “the American Dream” in 1980, according to Hartmann. So-called Reaganomics, or the rise of neoliberalism, brought de-regulation of capitalism, “which measurably set back the working and middle classes while also weakening our democracy,” Hartmann said. Both Republicans and Democrats espoused principles of neoliberalism, ending in an all-out war on democracy and regulated capitalism. It is hard to find fault with Hartmann’s analysis of this important issue.

The rest of the book outlines a 21st Century democracy agenda. In it, action steps such as making voting a right instead of a privilege, changing the relationship with the U.S. Supreme Court so there is a form of oversight or “regulation,” expand the U.S. Senate immediately by adding two new states (Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico), providing health care for all, and more.

Thom Hartmann

Importantly, part of Hartmann’s agenda is for each of us to get involved in our democracy.

You may think your voice is but a faint whisper in the wilderness, but there are ways you can amplify it at no cost other than a bit of effort. Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers. Become active on social media. Volunteer with the dozens of great good-government groups and organizations devoted to saving our environment, our democracy, and our world.

Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of American Democracy.

As we enter the 2024 general election cycle, many of us are seeking things we can do to make a difference. A good way to start is to read The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living and share it with your friends.

The author interviewed Thom Hartmann about the book on July 10, 2023. Readers can hear the 31:25-minute interview by clicking here.

Thom Hartmann is a four-time winner of the Project Censored Award, a New York Times bestselling author, and America’s number one progressive talk show host. His show is syndicated on local for-profit and nonprofit stations and broadcasts nationwide and worldwide. It is also simulcast on television in nearly 60 million U.S. and Canadian homes.

To buy a copy of The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, click here. The book is available July 18, 2023.