An insightful book that shines light on issues that should be better understood by any responsible citizen.
Two sociologists examine the many challenges facing “working poor women.”
Based on interviews and research conducted over the past 10 years, Freeman and Dodson, author of The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy, show the factors that place many women, particularly immigrants and women of color, in low-income positions—and often keep them there. The authors’ shared goal in writing this book is to help these women “climb out of working poverty.” The majority of the women have found employment in service industries, including food, health care, and child care. Many jobs in the service industry have unpredictable hours, leading to difficulty in finding consistent care for their own children. Additionally, most of these positions are low paying and lack benefits, requiring workers to take on multiple jobs to support their families, often on their own. In some cases, older children are required to assume household responsibilities for their families, sacrificing their own futures and contributing to this cycle of poverty. Many interviewees also believe that because they have children, they are at a further disadvantage. “Moms told us about the upheaval surrounding the birth of a child without leave, income, or accommodations to ease the transition home,” write the authors. Furthermore, domestic workers caring for wealthy families often face racism and harassment from parents and children alike. Several of the interviewees relate that their paths to higher education, frequently needed for job advancement, have also been filled with obstacles. The authors clearly show how affluent women often become uncomfortable when considering how lower-income families live, choosing to donate rather than volunteer. While the book does tend to generalize the views and opinions of individuals, the authors’ stance on advocating for others by encouraging policy change is convincing and sound.
An insightful book that shines light on issues that should be better understood by any responsible citizen.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-620-97771-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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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