An essentially conservative book that will fortify the opinions of fans of marriage.
The author of Home Comforts traces the history of marriage vows in Western society and argues for their continued relevance.
Making frequent references to her own two marriages—one unhappy and short-lived, the other happy and long-lasting—Mendelson analyzes the evolution of traditional marriage vows from their beginnings as a variant on the feudal vows held between lord and vassal in medieval times. The author clearly favors the traditional Anglican vows, crafted by “prose master” Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549 and still in wide use today, largely unchanged except for the excision of the vow by women to “obey” their husbands. “The very act of taking marriage vows in a ceremony has a powerful psychological effect,” writes Mendelson, and “the traditional vows are short and dramatic,” as opposed to vows crafted by the couple, which she believes evoke more chuckles than deep-felt tears. The author dives deeply into each element of her subject, from the commitment to staying together “in sickness and in health,” which is “the oldest, the clearest, and, one supposes, the most likely to be fulfilled,” to the vow to “forsake all others,” a more recent and less universal vow. As she segues from historical analysis to broader philosophical discussions of contemporary marriage, Mendelson also shifts to optimistic blanket statements—e.g., “Western-style monogamy, with its equal genders and social freedoms, is an institution honed into workability and high satisfaction after a few millennia of trial and error and insight gathering”; “almost everyone wants unending love, which means that they want marriage, even if they don't understand that they do”; the number of marriages that end in divorce says very little about the staying power of love.” Questions about the shortcomings of matrimony find no place in this chatty survey.
An essentially conservative book that will fortify the opinions of fans of marriage.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668021569
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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