Book review: ‘Abundance’ and ‘Raising Hare: A Memoir’

‘Abundance’ by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

The Democrats have a new idea to rally around, and it might just do the party some good, said Henry Grabar in Slate. With their new instant best-seller, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have handed the Democrats “a potent political manifesto” that can be boiled down to the single word the authors use as their book title. These two influential journalists argue that Dems should be the party of abundance, creating a government that promotes, rather than hinders, the development of housing, clean-energy solutions, medical innovations, life-enriching AI, and more. Of course, talking about creating a more productive government at a moment when President Trump is tearing government down is “like discussing how you’d like to redecorate your house while your neighbors strip the copper wiring from your walls.” Even so, this book is certain to influence many Democratic leaders, because “its optimism is compelling, even joyous.”

The abundance movement began a few years ago with one problem foremost in mind, said Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker. Many of America’s big cities have become unaffordable because so little new housing has been built since well-intentioned progressive laws passed in the 1970s put huge hurdles in the way. Klein and Thompson ground their argument in a critique of the obstacles to beneficial building projects— and applaud Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for plowing past such obstacles in 2023 to get a collapsed section of an interstate highway rebuilt in just 12 days. But “much of the second half of Klein and Thompson’s book focuses on supercharging American science, and here the authors edge toward a more ideologically nebulous futurism.” They imagine Americans of 2050 enjoying a shortened work week, refrigerators stocked with lab-grown meats, and medications that combat aging. But doesn’t the GOP have the same vision, except with government sidelined and equity a non-issue?

“Klein and Thompson are certainly on to something important,” said Julian E. Zelizer in The New Republic. Sure, their argument is weakened by “notable oversights,” including that their ideas about cutting red tape “could easily provide more fuel for radical conservative efforts to dismantle entire programs without regard for the consequences.” But defenders of government need to do more to make it effective, and one way is for elected officials to be more abundance-minded, removing barriers to the provision of things the society needs and promoting innovation through smart public investment. Unfortunately, “as a political tract, Abundance is less persuasive.” After all, voters cast their ballots largely on the basis of the stories they embrace. “For Democrats to win back power, institutional reform can only be part of the solution.”

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‘Raising Hare: A Memoir’ by Chloe Dalton

“The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar,” said Edward Posnett in The Guardian. Author Chloe Dalton, a normally busy professional, befriends an animal—in this case, a baby hare, or leveret—and learns unexpected lessons about living wisely. “But there is much more going on here.” After Dalton happens upon the apparently abandoned leveret and hesitatingly takes in the creature, providing food and shelter, she gives it the freedom to come and go while learning from close observation. As human and hare grow and change, “theirs is a mutual dance, one without a leader.” But Dalton, for her part, is transformed by what becomes “a sustained attempt to see the world through the hare’s eyes.”

There’s “something both wonderfully archaic and utterly contemporary” about this story of human-animal bonding set during the lockdown days of the Covid pandemic, said Karin Altenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Dalton is a political adviser and foreign policy expert trained to discern subtle shifts in geopolitics or in the moods of the people she counsels. Yet in this chapter of her life, “the sharp analytical mind of the adviser has given way to the keen observation of a 19th-century scientist.” Respecting her young charge’s difference, she refuses to even name it, referring to it on the page as simply “the leveret,” and later “Hare.” Yet “one of the great glories of the book is the way in which Dalton records the appearance, movement, and behavior of the growing leveret.” The author “seems to share Hare’s traits of serenity, stillness, and alertness to danger.”

Dalton’s plentiful informational asides “can sometimes feel like padding,” said J.D. Biersdorfer in The New York Times. Still, the book’s passages about the history of human-hare interactions “illustrate how horribly the animals have often been treated.” Because hares are unusually vulnerable to predators, they also have a high mortality rate. That gives Raising Hare “an extra layer of dramatic tension: Will the little thing make it to the end of the story?” At the same time, the book’s calm prose and “delicate” illustrations “provide a bit of solace in a world that has now returned to an even more frenetic state.”