A useful stepping-off point for a relevant topic that will require further study and debate.
A religious scholar warns against nature worship in all its forms in this examination of the belief that natural products are always superior and that natural laws correctly dictate human behavior.
Levinovitz, who teaches religious studies at James Madison University, believes that “nature” and “natural” have mistakenly become synonyms for “God” and “holy.” Accordingly, consumers today often think that whatever is promoted as natural automatically has positive values for one’s health and for the environment. But nature’s goodness should not be taken on faith. “Unlearning the orthodoxies of nature worship,” writes the author, “will be liberating—and not just from the guilt of feeding our children the occasional non-organic snack. It will allow us to seek complicated truths instead of being tied to mythic binaries.” Levinovitz tackles an array of subjects—e.g., natural childbirth, artificial flavorings, the close-to-nature lifestyle of early humans, natural healing, women in sports, and social Darwinism—and usually offers helpful examples to provide context. He quotes pointedly, but when advancing his own arguments, he doesn’t mince words. Levinovitz assails Deepak Chopra for his involvement with Wellness Real Estate, whose multimillion-dollar condos promise to align the buyer with nature’s intended rhythms; Gwyneth Paltrow for her expensive lifestyle brand, Goop; and Whole Foods Market for its “uniting claims about material quality and ethical quality under the rubric of what’s natural.” Indeed, shopping at Whole Foods transforms into “consecrated consumption, in which the ritual of shopping becomes a kind of spiritualized retail therapy dedicated to nature.” The author also examines myths about violations of so-called natural law, among them homosexuality and interracial sex, which have been regarded as having deleterious effects on society and hence have been legislated against; and the Catholic Church’s controversial stances regarding birth control and reproduction. In Levinovitz’s view, the core problem is the confirmed certainty about the goodness of nature when in fact, “our relationship to nature is paradoxical and uncertain.”
A useful stepping-off point for a relevant topic that will require further study and debate.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1087-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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