An appealing look at how our relationships with man's best friend provides a mirror of cultural mores.
In her debut, essayist and journalist Dickey, a contributor to the Oxford American, addresses how the prevailing negative image of pit bulls is not only misguided, but also a mark of broader social prejudices.
The author notes how iconic images of pit bulls “as snarling beasts” are frequently evoked to market a wide variety of products, from sunglasses to energy drinks. During the 2008 election, Sarah Palin joked that the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was lipstick. The well-publicized 2007 indictment of NFL quarterback Michael Vick for his involvement in illegal dogfights between pit bulls was not only shocking, but it reinforced the negative image of the dogs. After adopting a pit bull herself, Dickey was shocked to witness the negative responses her pet evoked. Tracing the breed's history in the United States, she learned this was not always the case. The author traces the pit bull's decline from social prominence, partly due to the mythology associated with purebreds. After World War II, she writes, when middle-class Americans began to populate suburbs, status symbols took on a new importance, and “dog fanciers turned breeds into brands…large pedigreed dogs became essential components of the all-American 1950s family.” Social stratification was mirrored by the stratification assigned to pedigreed dogs as opposed to mutts, and breeders amplified these ideas. Fads and fashion became significant when selecting a pet, while temperament was devalued; owning a dog without a pedigree carried a social stigma. At the same time, pit bulls, due to their association with dogfights, became suspect in the popular imagination, singled out by media hysteria over isolated incidences of dog bites by the breed. Such coverage in the media contributed to a law in Denver that requires pit pull owners to take out a $300,000 dog-insurance policy.
An appealing look at how our relationships with man's best friend provides a mirror of cultural mores.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-96176-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 7, 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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