Sam Smith's great American political repair manual

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"We are now in one of those periods in which everything seems weighted against the interests of the ordinary human being," contends Smith, citing a recent poll in which only 2% of U.S. residents responding thought the country was in excellent shape. We basically have two choices, he adds: "One is to do nothing and just let it get worse. The other is to follow in the footsteps of those before us who refused to let this happen and who refused to believe they couldn't beat city hall." In this bracing compendium of fact and myth about how the system isand isn'tworking, Smith (Shadows of Hope: A Freethinker's Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton) offers hundreds of remedies for the sense that we are powerless to recover ownership of the country. He tackles the monetization of values, the dependence on statisticians and economists (who "not only have trouble with theory but can't add right"), the power of global corporations that only use America as a mail drop, the substitution of busing for residential integration and the media's obfuscation of real information. Among Smith's suggestions: that communities, organizations and even individuals can raise money for their projects by printing their ownperfectly legal if it can't be mistaken for the government kindfor circulation in the local economy; that unemployment ought to be reduced by shortening workweeks instead of downsizing; that education and jobs control population growth more effectively than contraceptives. But these are only a fraction of the suggestions packed into this upbeat and rich exploration of how to refocus the democracy. Author tour. (July)

Kirkus Reviews

Droll, no-nonsense prescriptions for the body politic, by the editor of the Progressive Review. Smith (Shadows of Hope: A Freethinkers Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton, 1994) offers numbers of specific, hands-on ideas for citizens intent not on fixing but on "transforming and replacing the system . . . that controls America," injecting it with new levels of democracy, common sense, and compassion, so that the system, now dominated by large, entrenched interests, "serves and does not rule." The pace tends to be hectic, as Smith surveys everything from the national debt to the need for new kinds of sewer systems, offering both brief summaries of the problems and succinct suggestions for remedies. There is an abundance of (clear) lists and statistics, and most of Smith's analyses are presented as terse, often witty, paragraphs. That makes the book eminently browsable, but sometimes confusing. Insights are tossed off with abandon, and it is, at times, hard to tell what Smith thinks is important and what merely amusing or outrageous. Nonetheless, a useful, stirring, and ingenious guidebook for perplexed citizens.