BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

"Obama's Challenge is the fruit of Bob Kuttner's lifetime of engagé reporting, analysis, and advocacy... it is riveting, brilliant, and persuasive. Kuttner, in concise chapters written with great vigor and clarity, shows what the change could look like if Obama is bold enough to go for it and the gods continue to smile on him."

--Hendrik Hertzberg, from his New Yorker blog

In the decades-old movie, "The Candidate," the main character, a winning candidate in California (played by Robert Redford) wins his race, but the film ends with him asking, as we recall, "Now what?"

If progressives believe that electing Barack Obama takes the burden off our backs, we are wrong. In fact, it becomes even more incumbent on us to move our issues forward from the ground up. Obama needs us to support, cajole, and move him forward by moving the society forward. That is one of Robert Kuttner's key messages in this superb book that details a bold progressive agenda. (Actually, isn't being progressive just common sense for succeeding as a national community?)

I was talking with Margo Baldwin, founder and president of the intrepid and feisty Chesea Green Publishing (which specializes in "green" and sustainability books and the exceptional progressive publications). We were lamenting that the right wing publishing world has a well-greased echo chamber of shills pushing their message of greed and war, which consists of endless sleaze books attacking Democratic leaders. Progressive readers don't have the same publicity machine persuading them to buy books that champion their cause, but they also don't proactively rise up and support a progressive marketplace. That's the primary reason that we created the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace: to give a destination home to support progressive premiums and progressive causes, including BuzzFlash.

So we asked Margo to write a review of Kuttner's book, given that she was so impressed with it, she chose to publish it. And you can find her review here.

You can also find our review of another Chelsea Green book that we just recently post, "How The Rich Are Destroying the Earth" here.

But back to Kuttner's new book, being released now. Margo Baldwin writes:

[blockquote]Obama’s Challenge – Our Challenge: to insist on a bold progressive vision for the future that will restore the American economy and bring about a new shared prosperity.

In this urgent and important book, Robert Kuttner, who is known for his acclaimed economic journalism as well as being cofounder of The American Prospect and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos, explains what a President Obama must do to solve America’s economic crisis—the gravest since the Great Depression—and, in the process, become a truly transformative leader.

As Obama’s Challenge eloquently explains, transformative presidents have been leaders who rose to greatness in moments of extreme crisis, and who took themselves and the Republic to places that seemed impossible—Lincoln, Roosevelt, and the LBJ of the civil rights era. [/blockquote]

If Obama is going to purge America of its destructive historical barnicles, he is going to need the wind at his back, and a progressive population that is as much a part of change as he is.

Buy this book. Bury the right wing press with hope and change and the truth.

Read Margo Baldwin's review now.

This is perhaps our last chance to reclaim our nation from its atavistic tendencies and leadership by mediocrity and corruption.

It is our obligation to lay to dust the moribund right wing propaganda in the public commons of ideas.

Kuttner's book restores the passion, eloquence, and "fierce necessity" that we watched slowly drain out of the primary process.

Now, it is up to Obama and us to restore it to the nation.
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BUZZFLASH REVIEWS