Make a place for this book alongside Jane Jacobs’ classic Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Down and out in Atlanta.
Pete Hamill, one of the last great tabloid journalists, practiced what he preached. In News Is a Verb, he argued that reporters ought to write about ordinary people—not celebrities—and live among them. Goldstone, a veteran journalist, does both and does them well in this labor of love. While there are trenchant observations about the U.S. in this book, Goldstone focuses on the homeless crisis in Atlanta, where he lives. The “Silicon Valley of the South,” as it’s often called, is the nation’s third-fastest-growing metropolitan area. Goldstone seems to know every neighborhood and street and a great many of the down-and-out citizens he writes about who sleep on the streets, in shelters, and in hotels unfit for human habitation. Against the odds, these people hold down jobs—but, he writes, their “paychecks are not enough to keep a roof over their heads.” A map of Atlanta—with roads, highways, hotels, and motels—appears at the front of the book, so no reader can get lost, and there are ample notes and an eye-opening epilogue. Goldstone explains that he did not pay any of his sources for information. In a profession that’s increasingly lax when it comes to ethics, Goldstone is a model of ethical journalism. To protect the privacy of the people he writes about, he doesn’t use real names. With a Ph.D. in anthropology, he trains an empathetic eye on families that are struggling in an increasingly gentrified city that prizes property above people. “Families are not ‘falling’ into homelessness,” he writes. “They’re being pushed.”
Make a place for this book alongside Jane Jacobs’ classic Death and Life of Great American Cities.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593237144
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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