Selections from a year-long diary kept by a newlywed while sailing aboard her husband's merchant bark, evocatively framed with minutely researched background material by Petroski (Gravity and Other Stories, not reviewed). When Susan Hathorn married Jode Hathorn, she exercised her prerogative as a sea captain's wife to ship out with him, on a honeymoon of sorts. Their itinerary took them from their home in Maine to Savannah, Ga., through the Caribbean, to London and Cardiff, then back to Savannah. Hathorn's daybook begins on January 1, 1855, with the boat already at sea, bound for Cuba: ``This begins another new year. What strange things may happen ere its close none now know.'' By the end of the book readers will know, for Hathorn was a careful observer, noting everything from the disposition of her deck seat to the quality of the harbor pilots, the pleasures and repulsions of the ports, and most of all her needlework, for Hathorn is a fiend for embroidery, quilting, crocheting, needlepoint (``I have finished my twelfth shirt—have made four this week''). Petroski takes both snippets and great chunks of the daybook and situates the jottings in the context of the moment: what London was like in 1855, the backgrounds of the people Hathorn met, how maritime commerce was conducted. She even cracks Hathorn's secret code to reveal when she made love to her husband. By August Hathorn was home in Maine, pregnant, and still writing away like mad. The baby has been born, and Jode is back on the high seas, when the diary stops, just like that, as though Hathorn dropped off the face of the earth (though Petroski keeps on digging to give the book, and Hathorn's life, a sense of conclusion). The details, and the transporting power of the quotidian, are what fascinate here. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55553-298-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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