But is it teaching American political history as you and I remember it? Well, certainly not as I remember it. I learned about Congress in an admittedly rather dry fashion. Using the Constitution as the starting point, I was taught that it’s part of the tripartite American government, set up to maintain a system of checks and balances: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. I learned about the two bodies in Congress (House and Senate), how their members are elected, and how they work together to create legislation.
What is Congress? takes a different approach. Instead of being a civics book, it’s a hardcore political tract. The author is Jill Abramson, the former executive editor at The New York Times. That’s why, in addition to explaining what Congress does, the publisher’s blurb promises that “this book is peppered with fascinating stories, including the bloody beating in the Senate of a lawmaker in pre-Civil War days, the Watergate hearings, and Senator Joe McCarthy's shameful ‘witch hunt’ of Communists.”
Still, those are somewhat leftist-oriented, but they’re still ordinary educational tropes at this point. Any parent or librarian looking for a book for young political junkies, even if that person is not a leftist, could reasonably believe that Abramson is a good writer who knows her stuff. Her “fascinating stories” should engage children a lot more than the boring civics material earlier generations studied. The extended excerpt supports this belief, for it talks about the famous moment in 1856 when Andrew Butler beat Charles Sumner in the Senate after Sumner cruelly imitated Butler’s post-stroke affect; the decisions behind Congress’s creation; and the beautiful Capitol building.
www.americanthinker.com
What is Congress? takes a different approach. Instead of being a civics book, it’s a hardcore political tract. The author is Jill Abramson, the former executive editor at The New York Times. That’s why, in addition to explaining what Congress does, the publisher’s blurb promises that “this book is peppered with fascinating stories, including the bloody beating in the Senate of a lawmaker in pre-Civil War days, the Watergate hearings, and Senator Joe McCarthy's shameful ‘witch hunt’ of Communists.”
Still, those are somewhat leftist-oriented, but they’re still ordinary educational tropes at this point. Any parent or librarian looking for a book for young political junkies, even if that person is not a leftist, could reasonably believe that Abramson is a good writer who knows her stuff. Her “fascinating stories” should engage children a lot more than the boring civics material earlier generations studied. The extended excerpt supports this belief, for it talks about the famous moment in 1856 when Andrew Butler beat Charles Sumner in the Senate after Sumner cruelly imitated Butler’s post-stroke affect; the decisions behind Congress’s creation; and the beautiful Capitol building.
A non-fiction book for kids helps explain 2022’s non-existent Red Wave
I’m certain that garden-variety illegal fraud, combined with the legal fraud of ballot harvesting and mail-in voting, went a long way to explain how Americans suffering terribly in a bad economy did not deliver a wipeout to the Dems in the 2022...
