A devastating and illuminating book that shows how a city and a country got where they are and how difficult it can be to...
A journalist examines how corporate America and the politics enabling it have corroded an Ohio city to its very foundation.
Alexander (America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, 2008, etc.) understands Lancaster, Ohio, as perhaps only a native can. He understands intuitively what the city long represented, the communal pride it sustained, and how the shattering of the social contract between industry and community has left it a crumbling shell. This isn’t an inherently political book, but those mystified by the election of Donald Trump could well start here. Though specifically about one city, as the author notes, “whatever had happened to Lancaster had happened everywhere else, too.” In 1947, amid the postwar boom, Forbes declared of Lancaster, “This is America,” devoting most of its 30th anniversary issue to the city as “the epitome and apogee of the American free enterprise system.” It was also one of the whitest and most homogenized cities in the country, one that owed much of its prosperity to the Anchor Hocking glass company, which employed many of its citizens and invested back into the community. As recently as 1990, Lancaster considered itself special, and Alexander remains glad and proud that he was raised there (in a family that worked in that glass industry). What happened? Plenty: big-box stores, competition from cheaper foreign goods, union busting and givebacks, bankruptcy and takeover by private equity outsiders with a “strip-and-sell” strategy, cheap Mexican labor, political corruption, flight of the well-to-do to cities that have yet to face such a collapse, and rampant drug dealing and addiction problems among those who remain. The author effectively interweaves the personal stories of those who have lived there and continued to with an analysis of Anchor Hocking and the policies that have made a few rich while reducing the many to hand-to-mouth subsistence or to prison on drug charges.
A devastating and illuminating book that shows how a city and a country got where they are and how difficult it can be to reverse course.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08580-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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