Here are a couple of book reviews I encountered this week that have me itching to hit the One-Click button:
Wired’s “GeekDad” contributor Jonathan Liu looks at Hollowing Out The Middle: The Rural Brain Drain And What It Means For America. Liu, who lives in a small town in Kansas, has the advantage of first-hand observation of the phenomenon detailed in the book, namely the long-standing tradition of young people moving away from those small towns to pursue brighter futures elsewhere. The situation is neither recent nor particularly American — virtually every culture in the world has experienced this since the first cities popped up in Mesopotamia — but in a large country like the United States, the scale of the situation means the societal impact is more pronounced. The book, which focuses on one particular rural community in Iowa, takes on the elements of other significant sociological studies like the famed “Middletown”. Given the flap this week over the Daily Kos poll about Republican core values and the distorted significance of the political power of the “flyover states”, the need to staunch the “brain drain” in those places is pretty fierce.
Internet smarty-pants gadfly Morgan Meis, posting at 3Quarks Daily, shared a Bookforum.com review by writer/historian Rick Perlstein about Garry Wills’ latest book Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency And The National Security State. I tried to use the direct link to the Bookforum page, but it wants you to register first…so use the link in the 3QD post unless you’re okay with registering for Bookforum.com. But either way, do make the effort to read Perlstein’s review; other than some mild fawning over Garry Wills, the piece is the sort of review that makes you want to go right out and buy the book RIGHT NOW. Wills presents the thesis that the Presidency as it came to be after the death of FDR was completely redefined by the invention of the atomic bomb, not just in the raw significance of the power of having nukes, but in style and substance by taking on the trappings that were given to the Manhattan Project. It is this vision of the President as having a complete and all-encompassing shadow role as guardian of the nuclear option, Wills argues, that leads directly to the anti-democratic and paranoid machinations of people like Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, and which may no longer be reversible by any President. Perlstein, by the way, if you are not familiar, is the author of the well-regarded 2008 Nixonland, so if someone with that degree of familiarity with American political history is so enthusiastic about Wills’ book, it’s probably worth the look.
