Category: Non-Fiction Reviews

Democracy Awakening, by Heather Cox Richardson

I started writing this review of Democracy Awakening the day after the Presidential election, but I just couldn’t finish it. I was feeling too sad and the writing just made me sadder. So here I am, now almost two weeks post-election and I am better able to talk about this wonderful book.

Ms. Richardson divides her book into three sections: Undermining Democracy, The Authoritarian Experiment, and Reclaiming America. The first section gives us a comprehensive American history lesson, focusing on the words in the Declaration of Independence that she claims set the stage for the unfolding of our commitment to government by and for the people. “All men are created equal.”  Certainly an odd statement for 1776, when the only people who would be able to vote (and other marks of democracy) in this new land were white men who owned property. And yet, that statement has resonated throughout our history as we slowly but surely inched forward to expand the categories of people who fall within its reach. But the author also uses this section of the book to demonstrate that this “progress” toward ever-greater inclusion has been a jerky, back-and-forth movement, always interrupted by those of wealth and power who resisted giving decision-making ability to more and more people unlike themselves.

In the second section of the book, Ms. Richardson starts with Donald Trump’s 2016 election. She calls out the worldview of the Trump inner circle, in particular that of Steve Bannon. “Bannon and his allies escalated the long-standing anti-liberal rhetoric of Republican talk radio hosts into hard-right paternalism. Under Bannon’s direction, right-leaning Breitbart News Network had run articles attacking politically active women and Black Americans and yet could insist that Bannon was neither sexist nor racist because in their formulation, a return to a traditional society would be best for everyone…. This worldview struck a chord with disaffected white Americans who felt as if they had been left behind since the 1980s…. A worldview that put Christianity at the center was especially appealing to evangelicals.” Richardson goes further to examine the travel ban, Trump’s increasing closeness to Putin and Russia, the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the first impeachment and Trump’s increasing rewriting of American history. She quotes Trump as saying, “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology.” And, of course, she covers the second impeachment and Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

Richardson’s third section, Reclaiming America, reminds us, in the words the book’s jacket, “that it is up to us to reclaim the principles on which the nation was founded, principles that have been repeatedly championed by marginalized Americans. Their dedication to the promises embodied in our history has renewed our commitment to democracy in the past. And it is in their commitment where we will find the road map for the nation’s future.”

So here we are. We read this book before the election, as I mentioned earlier. Many of us were hopeful that this election would mark this renewed commitment to democracy that Richardson showcases in this book. But no!  So where do we find hope? I find hope going back to the first section of the book and remembering that our progress has always been two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back. Maybe this step, which I and the people in our book club find a giant leap backward, is just the harbinger of our next progress. We can hope and pray.

–Jeanie Smith

The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers, by Zeke Hernandez

The Truth About Immigration was published in June of 2024, and therefore was quite timely and relevant when our group began reading it in late Fall of 2024 – finishing our discussion of it just after the second election of Donald Trump.

Having read it, the upside is that we all feel better educated about how immigration works in the United States, as well as its pros and cons. While it’s clear that the current archaic system needs to be updated, it is also clear that immigrants are a net positive to society for economic, social and cultural reasons.

The downside is that we’re likely to start seeing mass deportations anyway, due to Trump’s campaign promises, and we’ll be powerless to do anything about it. We are living in a time when fear of immigrants has been stoked to an all-time high for political gain.

If only everyone could read this book. We’d like to think it would make a difference, but who knows. Perhaps fear is just an easier sell.

One of the main takeaways is that both sides of the typical immigration debate are wrong, or at least short-sighted. One side claims that immigrants are a drain on society’s resources and dangerous to “our way of life.” The other side tends to counter by whispering the victim narrative, that taking in immigrants is the right thing to do because of the violence and oppression that causes people to flee their home countries. The truth is actually far more powerful than the victim narrative: Successful societies welcome newcomers. Unfortunately, that information is rarely part of the discussion. It takes more time to explain, and therefore is harder to break through.

Zeke Hernandez is very thorough in his presentation of the details, and although the book is heavy on facts, it is readable for the average American who has not experienced the immigration system first-hand. Another round of editing before publishing might have eliminated some repetition of ideas and made the information that much more digestible. His various stories and anecdotes, some from friends and others from his own experience as an immigrant from Uruguay, are a welcome illustration. We applaud his effort to enlighten readers with the truth.

— Julie Feirer

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein walks into a bathroom and overhears women condemning her for spreading conspiracy theories as one of the loudest voices in far-right media. The women ask “What’s happened to Naomi Klein? I used to like her.” Klein says nothing to the group—she’s heard it before, and she knows they’re not talking about her. They’ve confused her with the Other Naomi, her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf.

This is the start of Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which tells the story of the two Naomis and unravels the many ways we have become such a broken society.

Klein and Wolf once shared the same political territory, critiquing how capitalism and the politicians it supports have sucked the meaning, energy, and money from our lives. Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argues that those in power often exploit even our darkest moments—Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq— to derail democratic norms and increase profits. Her No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies argues that, in a corporate culture, we’re encouraged to express our individualism by creating personal brands that make us all alike, broke, and hollow.

Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women makes much the same argument—that corporations are getting rich exploiting women’s insecurities about how they should look. The result: women focus on external qualities at the expense of their professional success.

The two Naomis comfortably coexisted in the same sphere, often being confused with one another, but both headed the same direction.

But when Wolf became a voice of the anti-vax, anti-mask movement during Covid, Klein began to take notice. Wolf was using the same message she and Klein had once shared but was skewing it to reach far different conclusions. Klein saw the government and pharmaceutical companies reacting responsibly to help citizens survive Covid through security measures and vaccines. Wolf saw these same entities as the enemy, defying our individual freedoms by forcing us to mask and invading our bodies with vaccines. The feminist position advocating bodily autonomy was turned on its heels in defiance of vaccines. Klein began to feel she was living a parody. “It was an out-of-body experience,” she writes.

Klein had a doppelganger, a shadow self, and as she shows, doppelgangers are seldom good news. They are our evil twins, representing our dark side. And they have unique power against us. (Doppelganger is a German word meaning “double walker.”)

For a time, Klein didn’t know how to respond, because Wolf could use any evidence Klein provided to make conclusions that served her own contrary position. She planned an essay criticizing Bill Gates for taking a position during the pandemic that she felt robbed the needy of essential vaccines, but stopped herself because she realized Wolf could use this same argument to tie Gates to those she felt were denying us our freedoms.

Klein takes this premise, expands it, then peels it back, layer by layer by layer, to show that what has happened to her has happened to our entire country. The meanings of words has been turned upside down. Choice, once used to define a woman’s right to make her own health decisions, now is used to argue against masks. Politicians charge their opponents with immoral and unethical acts they themselves are committing, and their words are echoed enough that they take on their own reality. What are we to believe?

Klein asks: “Am I who I think I am or am I who others perceive me to be?”

Klein covers this mirror world through multiple iterations, including political protests, racism, eugenics, conspiracies, and political ideologies. She offers an intriguing analysis of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict written before the current war. The two sides are doppelgangers, she says. The same yet totally different. Which is the evil twin? Both and neither.

This is a complex, deeply researched and eye-opening view of our divided culture and how we got here. Klein concludes with a call to action and advises us to remain calm. Our current problems are hundreds of years in the making, she shows, and have flourished because of our sense of individualism, while our support of and reliance on community withers. The result is a tribal society in which we no longer trust members of other groups, our reflex being to disagree with them without listening to their very real concerns.

It’s a world in which conspiracy theorists like Wolf thrive until, perhaps, we use our words and call them what they are: weird.

This was nobody’s favorite book, including mine—and I recommended it. Some BBBers reread passages, trying to squeeze the meaning out of them; others skimmed entire sections, eyes crossing with mental fatigue; many never finished. Those who did finish agreed that the book’s final sections, Part Three and Part Four, are its strongest. And the Epilogue is well worth reading even if you skip the rest. 

— Pat Prijatel