It’ll help to have Econ 101 under your belt to appreciate this book, but it makes for fine foodie entertainment.
Economist Chang takes an offbeat approach to the dismal—but delicious—science.
Born in Korea, the author studied in England at a time when the food was inarguably awful. Yet even in the land of toad in the hole and bubble and squeak, global trends began to break through. “With increase in international trade, international migration and international travel,” writes Chang, “people everywhere have become more curious about and open to foreign foods.” So it is that Britain became a multiflavored nation even at a time when economics became monocultural. Using foodstuffs as metaphors as much as things in and of themselves, Chang examines them in the light of economic history. Okra, for example, came from Africa on the Middle Passage, affording the author an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of enslaved Africans not just to the antebellum economy, but also to present-day wealth. Without tobacco and cotton revenues, he writes, America would have never become an industrial marvel. The author also clearly enumerates how developing nations have been repeatedly victimized by colonialism and have an indolent if rapacious ruling class (“unproductive landlords, undynamic capitalist class, vision-less and corrupt political leaders”). Moreover, he adds, many key exports such as cochineal and indigo became valueless once European labs figured out how to make even less expensive synthetic versions. Switzerland is the site of many of these labs. However, in a chapter about chocolate, Chang notes that it’s incorrect to think it’s a service-based economy: “Switzerland is actually the most industrialized economy in the world, producing the largest amount of manufacturing output per person,” whether chocolate or machine parts. Writing gamely and with admirable lucidity, Chang concludes with another metaphor, urging that “the best economists should be, like the best of the cooks, able to combine different theories to have a more balanced view.”
It’ll help to have Econ 101 under your belt to appreciate this book, but it makes for fine foodie entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781541700543
Page Count: 224
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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