by Alyson Martin ; Nushin Rashidian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2014
Not as much fun as Cheech and Chong, but a piercing work of sociological reportage.
How, where and why the United States lost the “War on Drugs.”
Bill Hicks once cracked, “I loved when Bush came out and said, ‘We are losing the war against drugs.’ You know what that implies? There’s a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it!” Hicks would have loved Martin and Rashidian’s cogent, well-sourced and ambitious analysis of the slow decline of cannabis prohibition in the United States. The authors frame the book squarely in the recent passage of Colorado’s Amendment 66 and Washington state’s Initiative 502, both of which legalized the drug for recreational use during the 2012 elections, and the narrative opens on those victory ceremonies. But then the authors dig deeper with interviews with figures like Valerie Corral, the “Mother Teresa of Pot,” who first formed her medical marijuana collective in California two decades ago. There’s also Colorado’s Mason Tvert, a subversive activist who used the media to deliver his message in a way that made sense to the state’s middle class. The authors talked to the activists at Montana Cannabis, where, two years ago, federal agents raided the sedate grow house by coming in with guns blazing. Martin and Rashidian ably ferret out counterintuitive trends, like the fact that much of the opposition to Colorado’s law came not from law enforcement but from those involved in the drug trade. They also examine the fallout and blowback of the drug wars, ranging from the brutal violence that continues to plague the Mexican border to the terrifying buildup of the federal prison population to nearly 7 million inmates, a majority felled by drug convictions and many by the illogical “three-strike rule.”
Not as much fun as Cheech and Chong, but a piercing work of sociological reportage.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59558-920-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2014
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ; adapted by Jean Mendoza & Debbie Reese
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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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