One takeaway: humans don’t taste like chicken. A learned, accessible, and engaging approach to a meaty—beg pardon—and...
Zoologist Schutt (Biology/LIU Post; Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures, 2008) gets to the heart of the matter of a topic that makes people shudder.
Eating people is wrong. So goes the title of a grimly satirical novel by British writer Malcolm Bradbury. It’s wrong, yes, but practiced all the same in some places—and perhaps not always the places you might think. (Ohio, anyone?) Schutt, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, looks into cannibalism as it exists in orders other than the human, assuring us brightly that some species do practice cannibalism without blushing. If you’re of tender mind and spirit, you may never look at a snowy egret with admiration again, and as for spadefoot toads, well….The author examines evolutionary theories of inclusive fitness to discuss the genetic rewards of eating one’s own, ensuring not just one’s own survival, but also improving the chances that, if the dinner is properly selected, one’s own bloodline will flourish. As for humans, Schutt explores some of the better-known cases as well as the less studied ones, noting that while there is reason to believe that many human groups have practiced cannibalism at some point in the past, the ones who are most often accused of it—the peoples Columbus first encountered in the Caribbean, for instance—may not be the ones to worry about. The sensational nature of human cannibalism assures that it makes for good news copy but not always good science. The author singles out a misplayed news release concerning a recent reanalysis of bone materials from a Donner Party site and reports that climate change is driving polar bears to eat their young, both of which are stories far more complicated than the headlines would have one believe.
One takeaway: humans don’t taste like chicken. A learned, accessible, and engaging approach to a meaty—beg pardon—and always-controversial subject.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-462-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
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