This can-do book by an activist seeking to rouse the public into action has a lot to say to anyone who plans on getting old.
A fierce advocate for the rights of domestic workers examines two phenomena—a booming aging population in need of long-term care and the rising tide of undocumented immigrants—and finds not two problems but one great opportunity.
National Domestic Workers Alliance director Poo is surprisingly optimistic in the face of what would seem to be tough problems for American society. With reams of statistics, she presents the facts about the coming increase in our aging population, and she points out that we can learn from other countries, namely Japan and Germany, that have already faced this situation and have been finding ways to cope with it. We can become a more caring nation by making certain cultural, behavioral and structural changes in our society, and Poo offers some specific models of change to build on. Some are technological developments; some are community-based projects; some are government programs currently being tested in a number of states. The author argues that just as the nation has built an infrastructure of roads and electricity, so can it build an infrastructure of care. The caregivers that the elderly must frequently most rely on are immigrants, “the invisible infrastructure” of our economy and our social fabric. Poo claims that we must create a way for undocumented caregivers to attain legal status, provide the training needed to raise the quality of care and improve their wages. She even outlines how the money could be raised to accomplish these goals. Her narrative is filled with stories of the lives and struggles of individual caregivers for the elderly that she has interviewed, and she provides photographs of her grandmother and other elderly women with their devoted caregivers. Three appendices provide further information on resources.
This can-do book by an activist seeking to rouse the public into action has a lot to say to anyone who plans on getting old.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1620970386
Page Count: 176
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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