Michael

Misleading Title

Reviewed: 03-23-21

I have to say that Ms. McGhee's interviews on what her book is about are far more compelling than the book itself.

I certainly agree that the costs of racist policy-making rooted in an ideology of deficiency due to one's skin color or ethnicity on the public good is high, and continues to be a scourge on our public discourse and the body politic. However, many of the arguments made in the book (although compelling) highlight an ideology of its own that it can't seem to shake in order to bring the reader towards more universal truths about the costs of particular policies on people who aren't black. In this case, I think the title is a bit misleading.

McGhee's arguments throughout seem to search for ways to label policy decisions that are driven by republican lawmakers as racist, without scrutinizing policy decisions made by democrats or those that were driven by issues of race themselves. Stats are somewhat cherry-picked to highlight particular public polls, that have, in recent years, shown themselves to have issues of their own. As a reader, and someone who is genuinely interested in these topics, I found myself hearing the same arguments get repackaged, and I found myself giving up on the book by the 4th chapter.

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1 person found this helpful

Fascinating premise, boring book

Reviewed: 12-09-20

I picked this up since it was on the NYtimes' best books of 2020 list -- and for me, it sits somewhere between disappointing and just ok. My main complaint about this book is that it takes a fascinating premise (a small town comptroller concocts a scheme to funnel city revenue into a personal account for buying and selling art) and unfortunately executes it with characters who are very thinly drawn, making it difficult for the reader to really connect with the actions that they take. None of the characters really seem to develop, so while things happen to them, everyone seems to stay in a state of stasis.

Some examples:
Becky/Reba (the main character), never seems to develop a relationship with anyone besides her best friend, and a kind of mentor who teaches her about the art world, despite the book spanning a period of nearly 40 years.

Becky takes on another name "Reba" among her art collecting friends -- however, its never explained how and why she takes on that name.

As a quasi-thriller, you'd think that Becky would have close calls that show how tenuous her scheme could be, but this hardly ever happens -- and the end of the scheme just seems to be some sort of happy accident.

The book uses cues from the real world in order to drive some of the plot (recessions in the 80's and 90's, 9/11 terrorist attack, ect...), but they, like other plot points, sort of just happen, and then move on.

I would have never thought that a thriller with so much potential could have turned out to be so BORING.

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3 people found this helpful

Not bad, a little repetitive, bad reader

Reviewed: 09-18-20

Overall, an interesting approach to the question of what happened to America’s middle class. It’s was interesting to me to hear a journalist call upon research from economists so much in making the argument instead of only letting the stories of individuals do all of the talking. However, while the argument was compelling, and one that I agree with, it does highlight how easily one can pick and choose their chosen set of stats to make whatever point that they wish. That said however, I appreciated the author’s hedge in the last chapter in which he mentions that the issues at hand are complicated and it’s not his job to present a bunch of solutions. Instead, he focuses more on laying out an argument and then letting the reader make up their own mind.

Overall, it was well put together, if not overly compelling.

However, who picked this reader? It’s like having Kiefer Sutherland read you a lullaby. This guys voice has too much drama on it for the subject, and continually pulled me out of the stories, because I was waiting for someone to jump out of the shadows any second.

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Detailed instances -- but not much explanation.

Reviewed: 08-15-20

To start, I have to say that I think this book deserves a 4-star rating as a detailed narrative of the actions of certain individuals who were interested in maintaining a caste style hierarchy of others based on skin color. However, I found it a bit short-sighted and was personally disappointed in this work.

That said, as an individual reader, I think I was just expecting something different than what this book actually is, and that led me to the 2-star rating.

I eagerly awaited the publication of this book, hoping that it would be a deeply researched tome that would provide illumination for race relations in the United States. Seeing the title of "Caste" had me believe that this discussion would go beyond the binary frames that usually are associated with discourses on racism by using the lens of caste hierarchy. As the book went on, however, I found the intricate retelling of past atrocities against individual African Americans--which most of the book is dedicated to--akin to a rehashing of past work. Instead of establishing a new frame using caste, I found that on many occasions, the phrases of "dominant caste" and "subordinate caste" were just replacements for the words "white people" and "black people", and I didn't get the sense that the investigation was meant to go beyond that. Discussions of India's and the Nazi's caste systems were scant, and never really were raised to the same level of comparison as those of America's Jim Crow and Antebellum south.

To be clear, this isn't to say that these stories aren't significant to be reminded of, especially during our current moment. But it provides readers with more of an explanation of WHAT happened to certain individuals at a very particular time, rather than providing a fuller picture of the WHY these things happen, and the deeper implications of those actions both on the victims and the aggressors. That's where this book didn't reach the expectations that I had for it -- which admittedly, may have been misplaced.

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308 people found this helpful

Needed context on the job of US President

Reviewed: 07-17-20

TL;DR version of this review: An enjoyable read that gives readers a good book for understanding the presidency, and the leadership qualities shown by previous office holders, but gets a bit too bogged down in describing how unconventional Trump’s presidency in it’s final 3rd.

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Full review:

After Trump was elected, I’d been talking with others about wanting a book like this one that would help to contextualize the US Presidency during a time in which it seems like the definitions of the office continue to be formed by pundits and the opinion classes. That said, I think that this book meets that goal. Dickerson breaks his book up into manageable and understandable chunks that are easy to get through while bringing in a good amount of history and a little bit of scholarship towards understanding the role that the president has played in US history, how the founders of the country intended for the office to be carried out, and also how power was meant to be transferred from one administration to the next.

Dickerson’s book also plays double duty as a book on the presidency and on the qualities and aspects of leadership as a whole. He argues throughout the book that the president is largely a management position, in which the holder of the office is tasked largely with building a team who can cohesively carry out what can largely be called the president’s “vision”. That said, there are a lot of takeaways from Dickerson on the leadership styles of particular presidents, including Washington, Kennedy, Reagan, and Eisenhower, among others.

Dickerson also argues for much of the book the incongruity embodied in the way that we choose presidents compared to what they actually have to do. He does a good amount of reflecting on the ways in which the current media ecosystem doesn’t help, largely treating the campaigns as a horse race, and amplifying the most entertaining aspects of the campaigns that have little to nothing to do with how the person being considered would actually LEAD the country. However, I would think that Dickerson is largely preaching to the choir on this one.

Lastly, as a creature and practitioner of news media, Dickerson spends an inordinate amount of time in the book highlighting the issues that are evident within the current presidency. This didn’t surprise me, as it probably would help to sell more books, but it got really onerous when I found not only Trump comparisons sprinkled through the text, but also what seemed a whole section on it. This could be evidence of my own exhaustion with this administration, but I really think it could have been edited down a bit.

All that said however, it would certainly recommend the book for those attempting to understand the US presidency in this current time. It’s nowhere near comprehensive, but is a good start.

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1 person found this helpful

Great beginning, but quickly loses steam

Reviewed: 07-31-16

Riddle's book has a very interesting premise -- that involves a horrific plane crash and time travel. However, as usual with books and movies on time travel, the problem comes at the time when the author has to explain to us as the audience how the characters traveled either into the future or back to the past, and what the stakes are. It was at that point, that the story started to lose its momentum, and it went from one in which I as a reader thought "I can't wait to see what happens next" to "PLEASE, lets just get to the end!"

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Increasingly annoying...

Reviewed: 03-05-16

If you're already well versed in the issues that are involved with the current debate of what should and should not be private on the internet, then this book really isn't for you. Eggers takes what is a very poignant issue, and dilutes it by giving us a bunch of flat, naive and increasingly, dim-witted set of characters who continually make bad decisions who then get lectured by those who don't agree with their methods.

This led me as a listener to increasingly become frustrated by the tone and methods of the author.

I'm usually a fan of the narrator here, but he seems ill-fitted to this role. This may be due to the fact that I'm used to hearing Mr. Graham usually voicing a male point of view in a romantic novel. Here, he has to deal with a female protagonist, who is much younger than one would think he himself is, and the narration becomes just as grating as this story does.

I petered out about halfway through--and will return this one.

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2 people found this helpful

Good Story, but grating Narrator

Reviewed: 07-17-15

This book does give an interesting overview of the state of the US auto industry at the beginning of the financial crisis, and the ways that Alan Mullaly pulled it out of the doldrums, but the narrator sounded so much like a used car salesman that it made the book sound like a pitch for hiring Mullaly, and it became grating as I came to to the conclusion of the book. You might want to opt for the print version of this one.

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3 people found this helpful

Just horrible all around...

Reviewed: 06-27-15

I certainly am in the minority here and must say that I HATED this book. It's FAR from intriguing, and NOTHING like Gone Girl, which I thought was amazing. The characters are a bunch of horrid individuals, with hardly any redeeming qualities -- unless you sympathize with fall down drunks, who have frequent lapses of memory.

Everyone in this book seems to have some sort of problem, secret, or commit some type of indiscretion, which made me wish they all would have been killed at the end of the story.

The structure of the story was confusing, and I constantly was wondering -- who is this? what happened? where are we?

Lasly, one of the three narrators was simply awful. I got to the end, and was finally able to breathe. I don't get why folks liked this book so much.

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A HUGE dissappointment!

Reviewed: 08-17-14

I picked up this novel because it hit a lot of genres I like, including disaster, drama, and thriller, but boy, the moniker of a YA novel really pulls this piece down.

The characters are stock -- they're somewhat likable, but they have very clunky story lines that are told in huge plot dumps. Being that most of the characters are of color (of Latino origin-I think), they must all talk in "street-slang" (read: use a lot of profanity, talk about females as sexual objects, while the girls are pretty spacey, and listen to latin beats to make themselves seem more "cultured") -- and they absolutely MUST have no other role but to serve the rich (READ: All white, privileged, and racist--because they just ARE).

The narrator in the story also provides a very teen-ish sounding voice to everyone, but the delivery is jubilant to the point of being annoying. I found myself on many occasions going "can we just get to the disaster so the story can get going?". When the wave finally hits the ship, the narration took away from the drama of the disaster, and at that point, I couldn't listen any more.

Granted, I'm not the intended audience for this book, being an adult -- but COME ON!

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3 people found this helpful