Certain to cause more arguments than it settles and likely to appeal most to the Allan Bloom/Jacques Barzun wing.
A defense of academic elitism by a former academic at an elite institution.
Former Yale Law School dean and longtime professor Kronman (Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, 2016, etc.) takes a jaundiced view of the underlying sentiments that have lately manifested in a series of events at that university and others: the abandonment by one college “master” of that term to avoid causing offense to those who might connect it to “the racism and hierarchy of the antebellum South”; the censure of two other masters for supposedly denigrating minority students by not issuing explicit instructions on what costumes students could wear on Halloween; the rise of “trigger warnings”; and so forth. An erstwhile anti-war activist and student radical whose “politics have mellowed since,” the author counters that college is necessarily an elite institution, that there is a hierarchy of values and ethics in the pursuit of knowledge and the ancient Greek ideal of excellence, and that democratization taken to extremes can only destroy those “islands of excellence in a democratic sea.” Kronman sees the most extreme damage as falling on the humanities, which “sound in an aristocratic register that today one is ashamed to acknowledge, yet alone proclaim.” One aspect of that aristocratic register is the distinction in accomplishment and rank between master/professor and student and the Socratic notion that there is a “rank order of human greatness”; another is the thought that tolerance of ambiguity and dissonance is part of the academic experience; still another is that academic institutions are “a community of conversation with a special ethic of its own," not a haven for retreat from uncomfortable thoughts or a safe space against microaggressions. Invoking Arendt, Orwell, de Tocqueville, and others, Kronman delivers a coherent, provocative case for a return to traditional academic values—though it’s one that is not likely to sway those who adhere to modern/postmodern mores.
Certain to cause more arguments than it settles and likely to appeal most to the Allan Bloom/Jacques Barzun wing.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9948-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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