An erudite analysis of Jamaica’s economic history.
A Jamaican scholar’s debut work analyzes the impact of neoliberalism on recent Jamaican history.
McKenzie, who was born and raised in Jamaica and is currently a doctoral student at Georgetown University, begins this work with an exceptionally useful primer on the history of his native country from the arrival of Christopher Columbus to later British imperialism, the World War II era, and decolonization. Jamaica, he says, is a capitalist nation “centered on a culture of servitude where tourism, hospitality, sports, and music are the main sources of income,” and the blame for its currently stagnant economy, he asserts, lies squarely with neoliberal policies, which focus on free market capitalism and deregulation—both inside the nation’s bureaucracy and its nominal Western allies’. Early chapters highlight how “neoliberal technocrats” forged a “Washington Consensus” inside Jamaica’s government that perpetuated, and even exacerbated, poverty for more than half a century. The book’s second half pays particular attention to how international events since the 1980s—from the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the global ascendance of the Black Lives Matter movement—intersected with Jamaica’s economic and social history. The author gives the ideas of Pan-African thinkers, including Frantz Fanon, ample attention and analysis, as well as those of Black Nationalists, such as Jamaican Marcus Garvey, whom the author critiques for his “Fascist ideological roots” and embrace of “Western-style capitalism.” This well-researched, interdisciplinary volume makes its points in passionate and learned prose, and McKenzie shows an expert command of relevant scholarship by historians, economists, and social theorists. The tour de force narrative unfortunately wanes in its final chapter, which examines solutions to neoliberalism using references to the 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things—an anticlimactic ending that doesn’t meet the high bar set by the previous 10 chapters. Nonetheless, this book as a whole provides important commentary and critical context on its subject.
An erudite analysis of Jamaica’s economic history.Pub Date: May 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0578-89794-3
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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