Richly researched, gripping story of a castoff San Diego wife who shot and killed her ex-husband and his new wife one morning in 1989 while they lay asleep. Debut author Stumbo (a Los Angeles Times reporter) makes no pleas but shows that well-spoken, well-read Betty Broderick was so beaten with betrayal by her husband that her present 30-year sentence is probably unjust. Betty and Dan endured nine pregnancies that produced four children, and Betty bonded to Dan all the way, sharing his obsession with getting a legal degree for himself, on top of his medical degree, so that he could reap millions as a medical-malpractice lawyer. This took big sacrifices: Betty was not only a mother machine and superwife but she also did extra jobs to support the family while Dan got his second degree at Harvard, fraternized with future business ties, and kept himself in brilliant plumage. Stumbo follows the Brodericks through their rise from poverty to high fashion in La Jolla, and she captures Betty's disbelief when, after 16 years of marriage, Dan fell for ``teenaged office bimbo'' Linda Kolkena. Dan denied the affair for two years while setting up house with Linda and giving her a fancy office as his paralegal. When Dan moved out, Betty's whole nature changed as she became foul-mouthed, burned all of Dan's suits, drove her car through the front door of his new house, and harassed him endlessly—all of which helped Dan win a no-fault divorce and the kids. Greedy but 'borderline hysteric' Betty grew ever battier as years went by, and finally killed Dan and Linda. Her first trial ended in a hung jury, but the second convicted her—of murder in the second degree. The white male power structure that defends Dan, his divorce rulings, and his silver-tongued but hard-drinking selfishness gets a rough going over here. You do begin to see Betty's side of things. Bang bang.
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-72666-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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