Short on juicy secrets, long on tedium.
New Yorker staff writer Robbins (co-author, Quarterlife Crisis, not reviewed) stretches a few secrets of the Yale secret society into a dreary extended narrative.
Herself a Yale grad and member of another such club (unnamed), the author begins with a dull history of the university and its hidden organizations. In 1832, William Russell returned to New Haven after study in Germany bearing the fundamentals of a secret society that used a death's head as its logo. The Order of Skull and Bones became the school's most prestigious club and retains that aura today; the 15 men and (since 1991) women inducted each year join a long list of distinguished Americans. Robbins describes the organization’s bonding methods. A private building, called a tomb, provides a safe haven for members. (An art restorer who repaired food-splattered paintings reports that it looks like most frat houses but with thicker walls and more morbid furnishings.) Skull and Bones pins with the number “322” are worn by members; 1832 was the year of origin, and “2” refers to Yale’s branch being the second one after the Germans’. Skull and Bones time is five minutes ahead of the rest of the world, but 1,802 years behind; current documents are dated D200. Only seniors join; each year's group chooses the next 15. Influenced by Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy, the initiation is led by a senior acting as Uncle Toby. Intense personal discussions and boodleball (soccer played in the large dining room) create lifelong bonds among the 15 and with their predecessors, known as Patriarchs. A month after his inauguration, George Bush senior invited the surviving Bonesmen of his year to a White House reunion. At least 58 members donated money to the presidential campaign of Bush junior (Bones 1968). Humorless and emotionally bland throughout, Robbins's prose sucks the vitality out of the story: privileged college students must be having more fun than we see here.
Short on juicy secrets, long on tedium.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-72091-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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