There is little effort at prescription here, but much complaint. Liberally inclined readers will find little that’s new;...
Noted conservative doyenne turned noted liberal doyenne Huffington (On Becoming Fearless…in Love, Work, and Life, 2006, etc.) enumerates all the ways in which the GOP has gone astray.
Born in Greece, Huffington knows the meaning of the word apostate. In a sidebar, “My Name is Arianna, and I Am a Former Republican,” she recounts her road to the Damascus moment, which took the hulking form of Newt Gingrich, who appropriated some of her compassionate conservatism and put it in his Social Darwinist blender. “I was seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled,” she reports, but not for long. The liberal convictions that followed seem of a piece with the progressivism of her moderate Republican ways, and indeed most of her notions are centrist: her belief, for instance, that ending poverty will call for a combination of public and private effort, and that the government has no business in the bedrooms of consenting adults. Like so many of the time, she has a soft spot in her heart for Ronald Reagan, who opened the door for what she characterizes as the right-wing takeover of the party by the likes of Bush and Cheney—and Coulter (“the right-wing punditry’s equivalent of crack or crystal meth”), Limbaugh, O’Reilly and company—as the radical fringe became the radical core. Huffington chastises the media for allowing this rightist cabal to proceed unchallenged, a charge that sticks but needs more elaboration than she provides. Elsewhere she walks down any number of well-trod paths: the lies about WMDs and the Freudian reasons for toppling Saddam, the right wing’s war on science, the abuse of the Constitution, the quest for saviors in the form of General David Petraeus (for Bush, “a magic word,” though a “thunderingly misguided” commander), the contempt for expertise. John McCain, Huffington ventures, will bring more of the same.
There is little effort at prescription here, but much complaint. Liberally inclined readers will find little that’s new; since anyone else will be unlikely to pay attention, this seems a slightly misguided effort.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26966-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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