Illuminating political and social history.
A chronicle of the “compelling web of deeply personal stories of individual gay men and women transforming the views and votes of those around them.”
Despite the title, readers will find little about Harvey Milk (1930-1978) himself. Given his status as a household political name in 2018, as well as the giant leaps made in the evolution of gay rights and politics since his brief tenure in 1970s San Francisco, Reynolds (Political Science/Univ. of North Carolina; Designing Democracy in a Dangerous World, 2011, etc.) pays tribute to next-generation politicians who followed in his footsteps after he flung open the battlefield doors. Featuring a score of personal interviews, the book follows that evolution in the U.S. and across the globe. Opening with the inspiring story of Maori lesbian Louisa Wall’s fight for same-sex marriage in New Zealand and then moving on to the intertwined legacies of Peter Tatchell, Simon Hughes, and the progress of gay rights in Britain, the author fleshes out the hard-fought struggles of—and advances made by—LGBTQ politicians in places like Massachusetts, the Netherlands, and Congo. While exploring the gulf between gay and straight representatives in politics, Reynolds offers before-and-after comparisons between the often horrific circumstances of the past and current realities of gay rights advocates. “At the beginning of 2018,” he writes, “1.1 billion people live in the two dozen countries where gay marriage is legal.” At the same time, however, “nearly three billion people live in countries where just being gay is a crime.” In short, while there have been many victories in the fight for equal rights, there is a massive amount of work still to be done. Peppering the book with interesting little details—such as transgender poster child Sarah McBride stealing a french fry from the author’s plate—Reynolds nicely textures his deftly researched academic book with a warm human touch.
Illuminating political and social history.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-046095-2
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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