“Sink into an otherness,” the author advises in this enlightening travel collection, for a voyage of self-discovery.
Reflections on a wild life of daring travel.
Award-winning fiction writer and journalist Shacochis (The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, 2013, etc.), a contributing editor for Outside, was infected with wanderlust even as a boy growing up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. His “disease of waywardness,” his mother told him, “had the potential” to land him “in serious trouble.” As his witty, irreverent travel essays demonstrate, it was not only his love of travel, but often his complete lack of preparation that threatened to cause trouble. In the far east of Russia, for example, he armed himself with pepper spray as protection against bears. “You have pepper spray?” a Russian asked him. “What for? To make bear cry before he absolutely eat you?” On his 39th birthday, Shacochis decided it was time for his “nicotine-fouled, under-exercised” body to scale 16,943-foot Mount Ararat. In all ways, he writes, “I was either uninformed or ignorant, and considered both states to be the mother of adventure.” With no experience fishing, he gave in to his obsession with the South American dorado, his “dream fish.” In his 20s, he met a couple who had renounced “convention and orthodoxy” to invent a ruggedly adventuresome life for themselves. Despite challenges and discomfort, he learned from them “that there’s never a good reason to make your world small.” In the long title essay, the author recounts in palpable detail his travels to Nepal in 2001 with his friend, photographer Tom Laird, who first visited that country in 1972 and “fell under the spell of the mountains and the culture.” Nearly 20 years later, Laird gained permission to document life and art in Mustang, a place of “melodramatic romanticism,” shrouded in mystery. Shacochis details Nepal’s tumultuous political past, vividly renders the landscape’s “luminous presence” and “physical sacredness,” and sensitively portrays Laird’s passions.
“Sink into an otherness,” the author advises in this enlightening travel collection, for a voyage of self-discovery.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2476-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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