An impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent.
A 20-year chronicle of a radio, TV, and Internet broadcast program whose mission has been to expose, defy, and edify.
In 1996, award-winning journalist Amy Goodman (co-author: The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupation, Resistance, and Hope, 2012, etc.) began hosting Democracy Now!, a radio news hour on public broadcasting focused on the presidential race among Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot. The show was slated to last nine months, ending with the election. Two decades later, it has emerged as an important source of news and analysis, broadcast on more than 1,400 public TV and radio stations around the world and on the Web. Goodman—with her co-authors, Mother Jones contributing writer David Goodman (co-author: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, 2008, etc.) and Democracy Now! contributor Moynihan—celebrates the program’s “remarkable journey” with this angry, hard-hitting volume. From Clinton to the current presidential campaign, no politician escapes the authors’ critique. They skewer the George W. Bush administration for lies that led America into a useless war and propelled us into the “endless war” that has followed. They condemn Barack Obama’s reliance on drones, pointing to casualties among children and families. “Militant groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda,” the authors write, “couldn’t have a more effective recruiting tool than the indiscriminate bombing and drone strikes by the United States.” The authors also discuss military interventions; whistleblowers (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning merit praise) and the government’s attempt to quash them; immigration policy; capital punishment; income inequality; responses to climate change; the “routine” indignities inflicted on gay men and lesbians and the brave LGBTQ resisters; police brutality and the nation’s ineffectual and racist prison system; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the scandal of psychologists’ sanctioning of torture. “Independent media is the oxygen of democracy,” the authors assert.
An impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2358-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
